WhistlePig 15 Year Estate Oak Rye

From Tom’s collection

Not too high alc. sweet for 100% rye. Spicy. Fullish. Good.

Smells like a campfire. It’s Smokey, but not overtly. Interesting, and I like it. I can see how whistlepig is expensive, it is VERY good.

Rating: 15/23 I'm a fan of Whistlepig Piggyback (at least for the price) and I thought that the Whistlepig 12 Old World was decent enough (but way too expensive). The Whistlepig 10, on the other hand, I have not found to be enjoyable. I'm hopeful that the 15 will continue the upward trajectory of the 10 and 12. N: Hmm, this is fairly woody, but it has a bit of some sort of fruit (lemon and ripe cherry?) balancing it out and adding complexity. I'm getting a little bit of leather in with the wood too and some nice herbal spices. I like this nose: it's decently complex with some well-executed notes. P: Whoa! This is weird. It took me a moment to identify, but there's this kind of sweet, floral-herbal, lightly spicy light flavor that's pretty prominent (because the rest of the dram is pretty mild and mellow). Once it clicked, I realized that it tastes like dry vermouth. It isn't a bad flavor, but I'm not exactly looking for my rye to be pre-flavored with vermouth. It's also slightly numbing (clove). Side-by-side, the complexities stand out more here than in Whistlepig PiggyBack and certainly more than in Whistlepig 18, but I think that the PiggyBack's and 18's flavor profiles are more generally acceptable. I could try digging into what the floral and other flavors are here, but at the end of the day, it really just does taste like a little dry vermouth was mixed into a spicy, dryly woody rye. F: Floral-herbal spice with some super mellow wood. It's hard to believe that this is 15 years old. Sort of like I.W. Harper 15 in that regard, I guess. This isn't a super great finish and it continues to remind me of vermouth. - Conclusion - This one is hard to rate. It has an interesting and generally tasty flavor profile, but it tastes really weird. I feel like I could take a different (cheaper) rye, mix it with some dry vermouth, and produce a comparable product. As sort of a cocktail experience, this is really good. As a neat whiskey, I have reservations. The flavors here are expressed very precisely and it avoids being as sweet as the PiggyBack, but it just also doesn't taste as much like neat whiskey. I sort of have two opinions here. Either this is definitely better than the PiggyBack and it's up in the 16 to 17 range or it's not as good and it's more like a 14 to 15. I like the PiggyBack's funky complexity, but it's sweeter and has more of a distinct alcohol flavor (though not harshness). I've gone in circles here and I think that I am landing on a 15. Pulling out Russell's Reserve 6 (a 15 to 16) for a quick side-by-side sanity check, this doesn't seem as good. I might go down to a 14, but right now I'm going with 15. That weird vermouth flavor here is hard to get past and there's also a lot of beet bitterness going on. I appreciate elements of this, but it's uninspiring overall.