Quite A Debut

For the last ten years or so, I’ve spent a lot of time pursuing various whisky books and websites, looking for new distilleries around the world that may be on the verge, and trying to keep up with the growing market. Flipping through the Whisky Bible a few years back, a Swedish distillery named Mackmrya caught my attention with its 95 point score from Jim Murray, who wrote this about the Svensk Ek flagship malt:

Mackmyra has branched out into whisky matured from oak grown in the south of Sweden. Before I tasted this I was rooting for them. Soon I twigged that this is an avenue they must continue along. It’s brilliant!"

If you’re into the global whisky world like I am, then you’re aware of the worldwide explosion of new craft distilleries that has made it almost impossible for professionals like myself to stay current. Alcohol is like TV streaming right now. There’s so much new content and so many new providers that no single person can watch it all. Whisky has become much the same way. No one human has a liver capable of processing all this booze. 

However, when you read about the excitement around a new distillery, you naturally become curious. Hence, I was thrilled when the team from Mackmyra reached out this month and sent over samples of their three core expressions. With the new law that allows for 700ml in America, we’re going to see more and more European distillers coming to market, which is going to be both overwhelming and incredibly intoxicating. This is one I think you’re all going to be very impressed with.

Let’s start with the Svensk Ek.

The first thing to know about Mackmyra is that all their ingredients are sources from within 50 miles of the distillery. Even their peat is local! Swedish Oak as well! In addition, the Svensk Ek uses single malt whiskies matured in American Oak, Ex-Bourbon, and Ex-Oloroso casks, with a marriage that clocks in between 6 - 8 years of age. I sipped on this whisky all weekend and—for the $49.99 price tag—I think you’re all going to really, really enjoy it. Think Aberlour meets Clynelish in terms of style. There’s a lovely sweetness from the Sherry, but the harmony of the flavors is what sells it for me. 

This is a bottle I would continue to buy after draining the previous one. I think it might become a Driscoll house staple.

Then there’s the Bjorksav which is finished in Birch sap wine casks. Yes, they make wine from birch sap, put that wine into Swedish oak barrels, and then finish the whisky in those casks. There’s an added sweetness that’s similar to a Sauternes or Madeira finish. I enjoyed it very much.

If you like a bit of smoky peat, then you should grab the Intelligens, which was blended by a computer AI system and consists of two ex-Bourbon casks, one fresh Oloroso barrel, one virgin American oak and one virgin Swedish oak barrel that held a peated malt. I thought this whisky was fantastic.

Overall, you could make the case that one should buy all three whiskies and do them side-by-side. At the price points, one can certainly afford to! I’d say you have to try the Svensk Ek for sure because that’s the showstopper, but the other two aren’t far behind. 

Quite a debut for these guys. Color me very impressed.

-David Driscoll

WOW......

If I had to describe the new release of Piper Heidsieck Essentiel in one word, it would be: WOW!

Tasting with the team from Piper Heidsieck last week, I was floored by the quality of all the new expressions, but this particular Champagne absolutely blew me away for a number of reasons that I will quickly summarize for you here. First of all, for a big house mark that usually attempts to cater to the broadest possible palate, this wine is clearly directed towards true Champagne aficionados. It's dry as a bone with an electricity you can feel in your fillings, and a minerality that is so saline you'll be wondering if they fermented the wine with fresh oysters in the tank. This is a Champagne for pairing with hard, nutty cheeses like an aged Parmesan, or the saltiest, briniest seafood you can find. Think Fino Sherry meets Champagne, yet with an elegance and restraint.

Made with 45% Pinot Noir and 36% Pinot Meunier, the red fruits add a savoriness and weight that is immediately felt on the palate, but they quickly transition into that 19% of electric Chardonnay that you can sense in every pore of your mouth for a good three minutes after each sip. Aged in bottle since 2017 and with 23% reserve wines, the complexity of this wine is fascinating. But, again, the real shocker for me is the risk taken by one of Champagne's most renowned houses. Bravo to the team at Piper Heidsieck for shifting both the momentum and the conversation back to the brand labels. The new Essentiel is easily in my top 10 wines of 2022. I bought six bottles for myself straight away and I’m not sure I’ll stop there.

-David Driscoll

New Shipping & Pick Up Options

As you may have noticed, we’ve added a new inventory location to our website listed under each product: Warehouse. Up until last month, Mission’s main warehouse was part of the Pasadena store and those inventories were reflected under the Pasadena location, but today we’re up and running in our new commercial warehouse space just a few miles down the road.

Because most new arrivals will arrive to the warehouse first, before being transferred to one or more of the five Mission storefront locations, we wanted to make sure online customers were able to place warehouse orders in a number of different ways, depending on their desire. If you’d like a video tutorial on how to use these new options, you can click on the video above or continue reading for a detailed breakdown.

One of the biggest limitations of our pick up and shipping options was that all the items needed to be in your location of choice in order to place an order. If the bottles were scattered between locations, or sitting in our new warehouse, there wasn’t an option to pick-up. With our new Ship-to-Store option, you can now send any available bottles to any Mission location by clicking on the store of choice under the shipway. NOTE: Ship-to-Store options are listed under the shipping tab, not the pick up tab. Simply select your Mission location of choice and check out as usual. We’ll send you an email once your bottles have been consolidated and are ready for pick-up.

For those customers who are not local and prefer to consolidate orders into easier-to-manage or less expensive shipping options, we’re also added the Hold at Warehouse option.

Yes, it’s a bit ironic that our new Ship-to-Store pick up options are listed under shipping, while our new Hold for Future Shipping option is listed under pick-up. But given the nature of how these orders are organized within our system, it’s an easier adjustment for our platform. If there’s a bottle in the warehouse you’re interested in, but you don’t want to ship it right away, then Hold at Warehouse is the option for you. NOTE: We do not currently allow for pick ups at the warehouse. This option is solely for customers who plan on shipping their bottles at a future date, or are unsure where they would like their bottles sent at the time of order.

-David Driscoll

What Do You Want Out Of This?

When it comes to a bottle of Bourbon, I know what I want:

  • I want it to taste good, even great if possible

  • Generally, I like it somewhere between 46% - 54% ABV

  • I don’t want to pay more than $50

  • It would be nice if the company that made it is the company I’m buying it from, rather than paying extra for a brokered whiskey

When it comes to New Riff Distillery in Newport, Kentucky (a stone’s throw from downtown Cincinnati), I get exactly what I want from every single bottle of whiskey they make. It’s a big part of what draws me to the brand and makes me such an avid supporter: a complete commitment to pure drinkability. Granted, you could say that most bottles of Buffalo Trace, Wild Turkey, Heaven Hill, Jim Beam and Four Roses meet the same qualifications, but the key point for me is this: not all of them do.

What motivates people to spend more than $100 on Bourbon today? It depends on what they want out of the bottle. Some people just want to fit in with the collective mindset of today’s passionate Bourbon aficionados. Others want to appear rich or affect good taste. Some want the affirmation of other hobbyists on social media. Others take comfort in the authority of a big brand name, no different than buying a shirt that says Gucci on it because it says Gucci.

All cynicism aside, New Riff speaks to me as both a whiskey drinker and a marketing professional because, as a company, it almost completely eschews the tenants driving today’s whiskey consumerism. As a brand, it’s forcing customers to make a qualitative evaluation completely on their own, without age statements, high price tags, or the pervasive and often forced collectability that makes consumers foam at the mouth. Almost all of their whiskies are between 4-5 years old, and there’s nothing over $49.99 at Mission.

So how do you know if it’s good? You taste it. That’s it. The rest is up to you.

That’s what Vic and I did last month when we visited New Riff and selected a private barrel for ourselves. If you missed the post from our trip this past August, we selected this cask only six weeks ago and it’s already bottled and in our possession! At four and a half years of age, this little workhorse Bourbon has the most wonderful aromas. I can’t stop nosing and nosing it, over and over again. Sweet caramel, cola, toasted oak, hazelnuts, fruit, baking spices, fresh sawdust, and more are waiting for you each time you bring the glass up to your face.

While the nose is pure elegance, the palate is a punchy little number, bringing the spice at 107 proof and fleshing out the finish with stone fruits and brown sugar galore. It might as well be a white peach dusted with C&H!! It’s like licking the batter as a kid.

New Riff Mission Exclusive Single Barrel #9514 107.3 Proof Cask Strength Kentucky Bourbon $49.99

I can’t promise you’ll like this single barrel of New Riff as much as I do, but I’m fairly confident most Bourbon fans will find something to sing about. Again, however, it depends on what they want out of their bottle. The only thing you can brag about here is the fact that you got a delicious Bourbon for a great price. That’s not always enough for some folks.

We’ve also got new batches of the standard New Riff BIB Bourbon and Rye back in stock, along with new non-exclusive single barrels at various proofs. You can see the full selection here.

-David Driscoll

Single Barrel Wheater

Most of you likely know the story of Greg Metze and Old Elk. Greg was the master distiller for MGP Distillery in Indiana for 38 years, dating back to the old Seagrams days, and was the company contemporary of the great Jim Rutledge. Before moving over to Colorado’s Old Elk, he made sure there was enough MGP Bourbon to get them through the early years and that brings us to today’s single barrel. 

We picked out this 6 year old wheated Bourbon almost a year ago and it’s finally here! MGP’s wheated Bourbon recipe uses 51% corn and a shockingly high 45% wheat component in its mash bill, so it’s a fun side-by-side taste experience with some of your other favorite wheaters. The nose of this whiskey is charred oak with fruit tea, the vanilla bringing up the rear. At 112.8 proof, you would expect a nice little punch, but the initial experience is sweet and mellow, just like a wheated whiskey should taste. The heat makes itself known on the finish as the richness fades and the grainier components of the Bourbon come to light. All in all, it’s a nice alternative to cask strength Maker’s Mark, especially since Maker’s doesn’t do a straight single barrel release. Having just tasted it again while writing this, I can still taste the baking spices and the fruitiness of the whiskey minutes later. It really does taste like a spiced fruit tea!

-David Driscoll

Terre Rouge: The Best California Wine You Don't Know About

This past Sunday, while visiting in my parents in Modesto, I took mom and pop with me for a little trip to the El Dorado Hills and one of my new favorite California producers: Terre Rouge. Started by the Rhône Ranger himself Bill Easton, along with his wife Jane O’Riordan, the wines from Terre Rouge have become something of an insider’s secret among California’s wine professionals, and for good reason. While other winemakers are selling you their most recent vintage, whether the wine is ready to drink or not, Terre Rouge is holding back its bottles until future notice; they’re not released until Bill and Jane think they’re ready to drink.

To give you an example, we’re selling the 2020 and 2021 releases across the board for most California producers right now. Yet, Terre Rouge’s current release for its beloved Tête-à-Tête rouge is from 2015. The French call it élevage, meaning “to raise the wine,” but Bill just calls it common sense. Why would you allow a customer to drink your wine before its peak?

Granted, that was a rhetorical question I just asked, but I’ll tell you the honest answer: American winemakers don’t practice élevage with their wines because it’s not cost effective and most customers won’t know the difference anyway. Why hassle with aging the wines yourself? Let the consumer deal with that burden. However, given that 95% of American wine drinkers wouldn’t necessarily know to age a $16.99 bottle of Terre Rouge Tête-à-Tête for seven years in order to get the best out of it, one could argue that holding back the wines until they’re ready to shine is a pretty good strategy in our pop-and-pour wine culture.

Indeed, what better marketing is there than an incredible wine that tastes amazing at first sip?! Given that we’ve sold more than 90 bottles of the Tête-à-Tête this month in our Pasadena store alone, we’ve seen that marketing work first hand, day after day, week after week. What makes the Terre Rouge so good besides the élevage? The soils. Terre Rouge translates to red earth, and that’s exactly what you see when you step into its hillside vineyards near Fiddletown: dusty and compressed granite soils, combined with volcanic stones, giving way to 60-80 year old vines that produce concentrated berries with fantastic flavor.

Bill was there to meet us at 11 AM on a beautiful California morning, wearing a big smile and excited to talk about the history of the vineyards in the area. We piled in the car and followed his lead past abandoned gold mines and 100+ year old vineyard sites, with Bill telling the stories behind each location. In the photo above, Bill is leaning against a Mission vine planted in the 1870s that’s still going strong today! Reminiscent of the gnarled old vines that often appear in photos of the Rhône Valley, those same varietals have thrived in the California foothills: Grenache, Syrah, Mourvedre, and so on. The Tête-à-Tête is a classic GSM Rhône blend and it really captures the essence of its muse, along with the ripeness of pure Golden State produce. It was amazing to walk the vineyards and taste the fruit right off the vine!

My parents were equally impressed. As veterans of the California foothills wine scene, this was their first trip to Terre Rouge and we actually left with a collection of their white Rhône expressions in hand: Viognier, Roussanne, and Marsanne! Even with the California heat, these high elevation sites are still cool enough to preserve the acidity in both white and red varietals and frost has actually been an issue for Bill. In some of the deeper crevasses, entire vineyards lost their fruit earlier in the year due to freezing. When you’re at 3200 feet elevation, you’re at the mercy of the temperature swings, but you’re also getting real mountain fruit, which has better structure and potential for again.

If you want to see for yourself, grab a bottle of the amazing 2015 Tête-à-Tête and see be amazed. Seven years of bottle age, 60-80 year old vines, mountain fruit, made by a veteran winemaking duo, and it’s only $16.99. Find me a better California wine for that price with the same level of complexity, and I’ll be impressed.

-David Driscoll

Dashing Into Fall

With Fall just around the corner, it’s time to start thinking about heartier reds and fuller-bodied California classics. The somewhat cooler weather this week in Los Angeles saw our wine team dipping into new expressions from some of our favorite in-state producers and no wine impressed us more, dollar for dollar, than the new 2021 vintage of the Dashe Vineyard Select Zinfandel at $17.99.

For the uninitiated, Dashe Cellars is a husband and wife winemaking team of Michael and Anne Dashe, whose combined 40-plus years of experience at Château Lafite-Rothschild, Ridge Vineyards, Cloudy Bay, Far Niente, Chappellet, and Schramsberg Wine Cellars should immediately grab your attention. Drawing on this wealth of experience, the Dashes create vineyard-focused wines that capture the complexity and character of top vineyards throughout Sonoma County and beyond. The wines are usually organic, biodynamic, or sustainably farmed at the very minimum. With a focus on older vines, steep hillside locations, rocky soils and stressful growing conditions, they work closely with their growers to ensure careful vineyard management and low yields. 

The Dashe’s experience working at Ridge stood out to me when tasting the new 2021 Vineyard Select Zinfandel because it's absolutely reminiscent of Ridge Zinfandel. It has the same elegance and concentration, along with a similarly-styled blend of 78% Zinfandel, 15% Teroldego, 7% Tannat, each fermented separately before assemblage. If you even remotely like Zinfandel, you owe it to yourself to try this bottle. Due to fires in Northern California over the last two growing seasons, it’s the first time this wine has been made since 2018, so the demand is high. 

With most stores in California at $24.99, Mission’s price of $17.99 is fantastic. You’re getting top quality organic fruit, curated and blended by two masters, aged 14 months in French Oak, for less than $20 a bottle. It’s a juicy and supple Zinfandel, but with ample structure and complete grace: dark red berries, hints of richness front the oak, but restrained at 14% ABV.

Again: think Ridge Zinfandel, but for less than half the price.

-David Driscoll

Clydeside Arrives!

As you may have noticed on our Instagram site yesterday, one of our favorite whiskies from this year’s Scotland trip is finally available at Mission: the Clydeside Stobcross.

If you need a refresher on Glasgow’s premier Scotch distillery, check out this post from early May. The Stobcross is a young whisky, and unfortunately we couldn’t get it into the U.S. at the $59 mark I was hoping for, but it’s a fantastic preview of what’s to come from the Morrison family’s latest enterprise. The sweetness of the malt, the purity of the distillate, and the freshness of the flavor are unrivaled by many of the younger malts I’ve tasted in my career.

As you can see, I loved the whisky so much I bought an entire barrel for myself!

-David Driscoll