Last Night's Tipple

Now that I have a back-up bottle of Barton's 1792 Ridgemont Reserve (since Ben found his barely-tasted bottle so odious that he unloaded it on me), I can drink my open bottle freely. Oh, who am I kidding? 1792 Ridgemont Reserve, even though it's positioned as a "small batch Bourbon," is widely-distributed. When you finish a bottle, you just go down to the liquor store and buy more. There's plenty. It's not like the various Van Winkle bottlings, which are usually impossible to find unless you get lucky. I am very grateful to Ben for his gift, though. He might not like this Bourbon, but as I have commented before, I do. As with many others that I have tasted, it benefits greatly from some time in the glass. After a few minutes, it opens up into a wonderful cinnamon-raisin bread pudding aroma. It's delicious.

Last Night's Tipple

The stated age of 1792 Ridgemont Reserve is 8 years, although it is possible that some of the constituent barrels are older than that (something that is true for every age-denoted bottle of spirits except for single-barrel bottlings and those that specify the date of distillation). It's not because Barton, which distills Ridgemont, is cheap or a low-quality operation. It's because the master distiller doesn't believe that additional age will benefit his Bourbon. He's not alone: there are a number of Bourbon distillers who don't like super-aged whiskeys and who wouldn't sell them if there weren't commercial pressures to do so. Jimmy Russel at Wild Turkey is one of these. While it is true that WT offers twelve and fifteen year old bottlings (for overseas consumption), Russel makes no secret of the fact that he doesn't think that Bourbon can benefit from that much age. I can see both sides of the argument. It's difficult for me to imagine Ridgemont getting better with more age because it's pretty outstanding right now as it is, and yet Van Winkle 15 year old is about as close to perfect as I can imagine a spirit being. Perhaps it has something to do with the mashbill (Ridgemont is a ryed Bourbon with an unusually high malt component, while Van Winkle is famously a wheated Bourbon), maybe the distillation process, maybe the types of rickhouses that each is aged in. I don't know. But I do know that it doesn't pay to be an age worshipper. Older is not necessarily better.

Last Night's Tipple

Another pour of Barton's 1792 Ridgemont Reserve. I still really like it (dark, dessert-like, viscous -- cinnamon bread pudding with pecan caramel sauce), and it makes me wonder what Barton's other Bourbons taste like. Well, not all of them. Mostly just Very Old Barton, which has next to no distribution outside of Kentucky.

It is a fact, childhood cliches notwithstanding, that a book's cover does matter. I like good packaging, and I know myself well enough to realize that good packaging increases my enjoyment of the spirit inside. The packaging of Ridgemont Reserve is just about perfect. I like the flask shape of the bottle. I love the fact that the bottom is nicely weighted to give it considerable heft. I like the understated labeling. I don't particularly like cork closures, but this one is at least attractive. Just about the only thing to complain about is the burlap band around the neck -- it's not in keeping with the rest of the packaging. Ridgemont Reserve would be good Bourbon even in a crappy bottle, and a good bottle could not save crappy Bourbon. But I am very pleased that Barton paired very good Bourbon with an excellent bottle.

Last Night's Tipple

I had Barton's 1792 Ridgemont Reserve Bourbon again last night, and my impressions were much the same as when I had it back in May. If anything, I liked it better: it's thick and dark and very flavorful, and it's an excellent buy for $25 a fifth. I have read a number of reviews that criticize this whiskey as being thin, flavorless, odorless, and alcoholic; and for the life of me, I don't know how the reviewers can be tasting the same Bourbon I am.

Barton Brands is not a big name in the Bourbon business. It owns a number of brands (Ten High, Tom Moore, etc.), but the only one before the advent of Ridgemont Reserve that had any degree of prestige was Very Old Barton. This has quite a good reputation, but it is distributed only very spottily outside of Kentucky. Most other distilleries, if they wanted to create a new brand of premium Bourbon, would have selected the "honey" barrels of their main brand because doing so would reduce the amount of time between the decision to launch the brand and the brand's actual lauch. Not Barton. Barton decided to create Ridgemont Reserve from the ground up, developing a new mashbill for it significantly different from the one used for Very Old Barton. Not only that, but they decided to change the mashbill not by doing anything traditional like substituting wheat for rye or increasing the rye content. They decided to jack up the percentage of malted barley used. Typically, the malt percentage in Bourbon and rye mashbills is very low, and the malt is only used for the enzymes it contains that convert the starch in the other, unmalted grains into sugars so that the yeast will have something to ferment. Barton is the only Bourbon distillery that uses it as a flavoring grain. I can't honestly claim to be able to taste the malt in Ridgemont Reserve, but I can say that Ridgemont Reserve is different from other Bourbons that I have tried.

Last Night's Tipple

Ridgemont Reserve 1792 Small Batch Bourbon is Barton Brands' entry into the boutique Bourbon product category, and it is primarily famous because of the trademark infringement suit filed by Brown-Forman, owner of the Woodford Reserve brand, against Barton alleging that Ridgewood Reserve (as Ridgemont Reserve was then called) had ripped off Woodford Reserve's name and packaging. The court agreed with Brown-Forman about the name but not the packaging, so Barton relaunched the brand as Ridgemont Reserve in mid-2004. Everything that I've read about the lawsuit seems to agree that instead of being a disaster for Barton, it actually stimulated sales of the Bourbon and helped them greatly in launching the brand. I don't know if it helped Brown-Forman with Woodford Reserve as much, but the publicity that the trial generated couldn't have hurt.

Anyway, Spec's had a pretty good price on Ridgemont Reserve, and I had read some good things about it; so I picked up a bottle. And a beautiful bottle it is, too. The thick glass bottom gives it a lot of heft, and I like the wood-topped cork. One of the reasons that Barton prevailed on the packaging component of the trademark infringement suit is that the judge thought that their bottle was most similar to a decanter while Woodford Reserve's bottle was most similar to a flask. The Bourbon in side isn't bad, either. Initially, there's cinnamon and cloves on the nose; but as it sits in the glass, it develops a dominant butterscotch aroma. The cinnamon and cloves also come through on the palatte, with some caramel and vanilla on some sips. The dominant characteristic, though, is that it has an oily mouthfeel. I don't mean that to be a pejorative description -- it just feels like you're drinking something other than water. This isn't my favorite Bourbon of all time, but I like it, especially at the price.