The Woodford Reserve 2013 Master’s Collection Classic Malt and Straight Malt Whiskey

Tasting Notes, in the Form of a Platonic Dialogue between Two Masters (of Woodford Reserve Collections): 

Classic: You would say, wouldn’t you, old friend Straight, that a nose, besides holding glasses, should evoke corn, coolant from a 1977 Pinto Wagon  and a farrago of rye, barley, aloe vera, ferns plucked from the inland Amazon basin, and old white dog.

Straight: Your visions always inspire me, but sometimes confuse me: “White dog” the new make moonshine, or a Samoyed, a Hungarian Kuvasz, or a Borzoi?

Classic: Both, Straight, both. Expand yourself! Add in the dry erase markers that 4th grade boys huff when writing their name 100 times on the whiteboard, a dash of particle board shavings, et voilà! One has, dare I say, a classic nose.

Straight: For the form of a nose, beyond the herbs ripe, rife, and abundant enough to be immobilized in Bellagio’s Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in Las Vegas, one needs a Sweet-n-Low-flavored off-brand toothpaste from the Vermont Country Store, mashed by mortar-and-pestle with fresh cherry blossoms.

Classic: Dear friend, is this a whiskey, or a recipe for artificial pheromones to seduce aardvarks? 
  

Straight: Now, now, let’s not go there, but rather to the mouth. I think fading fire, leaving behind embers to emblazon a brand on the tongue; a smooth transition from the nose, yielding a note that goes on and on like a train whistle first piercing the prairie night, and then still lingering over the hills until only the echo in the mind remains, a Tibetan Temple Bell resonating in the rough-hewn cabin of a family of mountaineers.

Classic: A case can be made for that, but for a classic taste, perhaps instead a lilting sweetness that one might find from being aged in casks made from honeysuckle in a cave in which people come to smoke mentholated cigarettes, leaving behind traces of tar and surprise at whom you went home with from the bar at closing time.

Straight: Millet, maybe with hints of millet, but to be more specific, Jean-François Millet’s “L’Angelus,” hanging in the Musée d’Orsay.

Classic: Paris? No. A savannah, with baskets of ripe peaches being transported by a mahout riding an elephant to the finish line at the Kenya Derby. Smooth, tannic—Satanic, even—staying mid-tongue. 

Straight: Dissent again, for you’ve overlooked waxen ficus leaves; indeed a waxed ficus in the office of a receptionist at a corn syrup refinery.

Classic: I believe that again, we must agree to disagree.

Rating:

                                                                      –Bill
   
    
     
    
     
     

–Our thanks to Liz Bingham, Andrea Duvall, and Brown-Forman for the samples!