Legent Bourbon

Great Costco buy @ $39. sweet, tart cherry, nutty, 47%. cool cork like Japanese Hibiki products.

Wine comes right on the nose. Taste of caramel, cherries, and wine. Smooth long finish.

I rarely drink bourbon, let along buy a bottle, but the Japanese angle was intriguing enough to justify a $40 gamble. The wine and sherry casks do a good job of tempering the creamy bourbon flavors that don’t normally appeal to me, especially so on the nose, where the sugary vanilla and pleasantly sour berries blend together well in harmonious layers. In the mouth the flavors appear in sequence: creamy at first (a bit too cloying for me, like artificially sweetened ice cream), fruity and spicy on the palate, and dry on the long finish. The cream reappears at the very end, the sweetness tempered by an undertone of dry wine notes. It’s an interesting experiment and I don’t begrudge the purchase, especially given the handsome bottle, but it’s not the bourbon that is going to lure me away from House Barley given the overall dominance of the vanilla flavors and the lack of integration on the palate. If you’re an adventurous lover of the corn spirit, however, I wager you’ll enjoy this a lot.

Vanilla, sweet, caramel, spicy - bit o' peanut