Appearance: Transparent pale gold.
Aroma: Vanilla, caramel and orange oil but it’s a very faint and feeble aroma profile.
Flavour and Texture: There is an initial taste of sugar followed by ethanol that has been flavoured with a few drops of vanilla, citrus and toffee. This is followed quickly by a flash of mild heat and the flavor of raw alcohol. A tinge of vanilla remains and then suddenly everything stops dead - there is no length at all. The texture is thin, insipid and the sugar content is very low so it has no viscosity.
This is a poor and gutless liqueur. It does not have any unpleasant aromas or flavours, but it is singularly anaemic.
If you took a bottle of generic vodka and added 10ml of vanilla essence, 10ml of orange essence and 20ml of caramel flavouring then topped it up with 100ml of sugar syrup you would get this liqueur. I bet that is exactly the recipe, with maybe a few drops of herbal extracts as well. It is supposed to have a brandy base but I could not detect it. If there is brandy used I bet it's only a small part of the recipe and the vast majority of the base for this is just food-grade ethanol.
Uninteresting and overpriced. I regret buying it and now we are wondering what to do with the rest of the bottle. Maybe we can use it for cooking or in cocktails? It might substitute for vodka in an espresso martini, but it would make a weak cocktail. I'll try putting it in the freezer to try neat when chilled but I don't think it will be much improved.
“Poor” : 60/100 (1 star)
51.0
AUD
per
Bottle
Create Account
or
Sign in
to comment on this review
Second follow-up. We used this today to make espresso martinis, subbing it for the vodka. The cocktails were very sweet and easy to drink, and probably half the strength they would usually be. They hid the liqueur nicely but lacked "bite". I'd make them again.
A follow-up from the first tasting. We put the bottle in the freezer and let it chill well, which improved the texture by giving it density. However apart from that there was little change. The aroma became more focused on the citrus note and on the palate I detected the faintest suggestion of brandy, but otherwise it was unchanged. We both thought that this is more like an underpowered flavoured vodka than anything else.