Rating: 16/23 This bottle has been low for a long time and has gotten a lot of air. It's not quite a comical levels of aeration, but it's getting toward there. N: Herbal, rye spice, green apple, vanilla, contoured wood with some little dustiness bordering on freshly cut fruit (pear or guava with a little grapefruit), a bit of creosote. The dustiness gets a bit earthy, but it never approaches jalapeño or brings in any substantial terroir. I'm note properly representing this here, but it's rich, complex, fairly mature, and a bit too sweet. P: Sweet vanilla, rye spice (cinnamon, clove, ginger), green apple, anise, restrained yet prominent wood, other herbs bouncing about. A bit of clean creek water tying into that sweetness, but no alcohol flavor. This is complex and tasty, but the balance is a bit questionable with the big sweetness and vanilla. F: Those tannic spices remain, blending into some wood. There's the vanilla and some occasional green apple. Getting long into the finish, the green apple is replaced mostly by anise, though a bit of it remains and a bit more green apple skin flavor comes in. - Conclusion - This seems competitive with Rittenhouse Rye (16). This has more going on, but Rittenhouse is more balanced with a bourbon sweet richness. This is sweet, but it's a bit too much in the watery dimension for that to be a wholly good thing. The complexity here with punchy flavors is really nice though. WhistlePig PiggyBack (16) is nice too. It's more restrained than this is, but it's also more balanced while it retains a dry complexity. This is more peppery with anise, creating a bit of a creosote character that I like and seems very fitting for a rye. Russell's Reserve Single Barrel Rye (17) competes with this on richness while balancing that sweet peanutty, bourbony flavor with herbal rye characters of anise, grassy green apple, and black pepper. This is more complex, but the Russell's is more balanced and coherent without being bland. I'm not totally sure which I like better. Considering that I found this competitive with both the Whistlepig and the Russell's, this needs to be either a 16 or 17. I'm just a little inclined to give the win to the Russell's here and I'm not totally sure that the Whistlepig doesn't at least tie this either, so I'm going with a 16. Great stuff for the price.