Bourbon’s Shot at the Big Time – The Times
Spirits of the Times has good article about bourbon, specifically premium bourbon.
From 2002 to 2006, sales of bourbon and Tennessee whiskey rose by 12.23 percent. In the same period, sales of high-end whiskeys ($20 to $30) rose by 27.62 percent and sales of superpremium bourbons (above $30) rose by 60.52 percent.
Sales are one thing. The Dining section’s tasting panel recently evaluated 25 bourbons strictly to answer another question: How good are these whiskeys, anyway? The short answer is, very good. For the tasting, Florence Fabricant and I were joined by Pete Wells, editor of the Dining section, who has written extensively about drinks, and Ethan R. Kelley, the spirit sommelier* at the Brandy Library in TriBeCa.
I didn’t know there were spirit sommeliers, did you?
It looks like I have a little shopping to do; right now, my collection includes only two of their top bourbons (Woodford Reserve and Jim Bean Black) and a few that just missed the cut (Wild Turkey and Old Rip Van Winkle 10 years old). Finding a bourbon tasting somewhere in BeltwayLand would probably be even better.
There is a multimedia component to the article as well.
*Not in Blogger’s dictionary
