Paul Masson VS Grande Amber Brandy

Not much flavor, but its the first time trying brandy.

Nose - banana, vanilla cream, Nilla Wafer, toffee, brown sugar, cherry, grape, high ethanol burn. Taste - brown sugar, banana, vanilla, toffee, grape, cherry, cinnamon, prickly barrel spice, high alcohol bite, finishing fast with chemically vanilla, caramel, and spicy oak flavors. It’s chemically and cloying and hot. Definitely not a sipper.

Drinkable, but generally too reminiscent of fingernail polish and bad bourbon.

I ventured into the land of low-cost Brandies again and tried this well-received offering from Paul Masson. It was okay. It had nice flavors and it coated the glass nicely but the flavors were not a lively as the E&J XO brandy. For the cost, it is a good deal but I did like the flavors it is $13 in my area.

The nose has pear, cherry, spice, and maybe a little orange. It's nice but mellow. The palate has this awful, cloying caramel flavor. It just pervades. There's some odd mushroom too. It reminds me a bit of Corralejo Reposado, but more cloying. Actually, the two are quite similar, but the viscous sweetness of this is too much. The fruits taste artificial as well. There's this gross grape jelly flavor that is hard to get past. The spices come through a lot in a Christmas way with some prickling more than in a fiery way. It's pretty awful. It's hard to describe how much worse than Hennessy VS and E&J XO this is. There's a weird honey flavor here with some bitterness and mushrooms. It tastes a bit like tar and gasoline too. There is some caramel and vanilla to give it some nice creaminess, but this is not all that believable in its insistence that it is brandy. It's simultaneously too sweet and too bitterly mushroomy. This doesn't taste natural. It's really awful.

Smooth. Sweet. Hint of cinnamon. Hint of oak. Definitely not Hennessy. But for $10 really good quality.