ContemplativeFox
Opthimus 21 Solera
Aged Rum — Dominican Republic
Reviewed
August 30, 2021 (edited September 3, 2021)
Rating: 17/23
So Opthimus has 15, 18, and 21 year age statement solera releases and this bar is selling them all for the same price. This makes me wonder...is this brand bottling the same thing and putting 3 different labels on it?
N: Sweet, rummy. It reminds me a lot of Diplomatico. Fruit, some tart wood. My overall impression is sweet with this dry tartness. There's some fun funkiness and complexity. Vanilla brings in the sweetness. It's a complex sweet nose that shows decent age. The fruit is in the orange, like, and banana range. As it site in my glass, that wood acquires a bit of an aged mustiness to it like a bourbon that's older than 10 years. A days of peanut s and peanut shells, but not much. I can dig out a lot of complexity here, but it's serious work.
Oloroso. That's the dry tartness. And it explains some of that nuttiness too. I'm not getting leather on the nose from it, but there isn't much in the way of spices, so that makes sense.
P: Sweet, light, a bit thin, but actually not that watery. There's a lot going on here. I get tropical fruits (banana, like, orange), nuttiness (peanut but not very oily), tartness, some mellow wood that tastes fairly mature. There's some light but not unnatural caramel. The complexity a d balance are quite good. I don't have them side by side, but I'd be inclined to call this a slightly better version of plantation 20th anniversary. Faint tannins; they're super mellow.
F: Nuttiness, wood, tartness. Then some light vanilla sweetness. Not much in the way of tropical fruit at this point. There wasn't ever a ton, but now there's very little.
- Conclusion -
I really enjoy this. I have Plantation 20th Anniversary at a 17, but I'm skeptical of that. This just isn't an 18, yet it's better than Plantation 20th. A 15 is the lowest score I could consider for this and I think a 16 or 17 is really where it should be. That musty age just hit me late late in the finish. I'm going with a 17.
80.0
USD
per
Bottle
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