Drinking The World

Tuaca Liquore Italiano is 35% abv. 70 proof and the color is a beautiful amber gold.

The aroma starts off with a big, smooth, rich hit of vanilla and buttery notes; followed by a subtle orange/citrus with hints of spices that puts you in mind of the aroma of an adult version of a creamsicle orange/vanilla ice cream pop. One that has been dunked in a fine, aged brandy. As it sits more of the vanilla comes out buoyed up with honey tones.

The taste is slightly sweet and warm, complex, with the same flavors as the aroma but with the vanilla downplayed, but more of the spices coming through, balanced by the medium light body. I first tasted this liqueur in Tim Love's Lonesome Dove Western Bistro in NYC after watching him win on Iron Chef America during the taping a few hours prior. He and his crew had tossed back cold shots every 15 minutes during the competition. So I was curious and ordered a icy shot. I sipped it slowly, rather than tossing it back and very much enjoyed the liqueur. So much so that I have had a bottle in my collection ever since. Tuaca is great sipped in a snifter or on the rocks, in a highball with seltzer, or in the many Tuaca based cocktails

Irish Mist liqueur is 35% abv. / 70 proof and supposedly dates back to a thousand year old recipe for "Heather Wine.'

The color of Irish Mist is a medium amber gold. The aroma is that of fine whiskey, honey, herbs, baking spices, and vanilla notes. It's very full, complex, warm, and enjoyable.

The taste is of sweet Irish whiskey, tempered with honey, vanilla, and baking spices. Like the aroma the taste is warm, complex, and full. I like this straight in a snifter, on the rocks, or in cocktails. It's a perfect after dinner sipper, especially on these cold winter nights when you are snuggled up on the couch gazing into the fire. It's guaranteed to warm you up and mellow you out.

Sweetgrass Farm Winery Cranberry Smash is 21% abv. / 42 proof is made by Keith Bodine who makes the excellent Back River Gin I mentioned last summer. This ruby hued dessert wine / liqueur is basically a fortified wine made in a somewhat similar fashion to port or sherry. First cranberry wine is fermented, and then some of the wine is removed where it is distilled into cranberry brandy, which is then added back to the wine which stops the fermentation. The fortified cranberry wine is then allowed to age additionally until it has mellowed and blended fully.

Besides looking like a red jewel shaped bottle, the liqueur has an incredible aroma. The smell of gently simmering cranberry sauce mixed with that of fresh crushed cranberries, with a soft and faint hint of spice to it. The taste is more of the same. The fresh, crisp, tart berry taste from the cranberry wine. The deeper and sweeter cooked cranberry tones from the cranberry brandy. Added together they give a much fuller cranberry flavor than either one alone.Complex, deep, tart and sweet, and very refreshing. I've tasted many cranberry liqueurs, but this one is the best I have had so far. A real winner. I can't wait to try their Blueberry Smash when it becomes available in a few weeks.

You can drink this liqueur after dinner as a not too sweet treat, or to settle your stomach as a digestif. But you can also drink it before dinner as an aperitif straight or with a splash of seltzer. For a refreshing cooler you can add it to a nice white wine or even to champagne to make a Cranberry Bellini. I am sure that when some master mixologists get their hands on it they will come up with all kinds of great cocktails to replace the tired old Cosmo. So far it is only available in Maine, but look for it soon in other states.

Wild Turkey American Honey Liqueur is 35.5% abv. / 71 proof and is made with honey and Wild Turkey bourbon. The color is a medium to dark gold. I am not a fan of most of the Wild Turkey products, but was intrigued by this bourbon and honey liqueur. So when I saw it on sale really cheap at the New Hampshire State liquor store I said "what the heck" and picked up a bottle.

The aroma is slightly sharp and sour/sweet and tangy. You can sense the presence of bourbon under some very strange top notes that are camphor like, and salty, and of hot and volatile machine oils. The more I tried to smell the liqueur, the less I smelled anything, until my nose went numb. Then I had a difficult time discerning the aroma at all. I never had my nose go blind before and I wasn't sure I actually wanted to taste it, but I got up my nerve and proceeded on.

The taste was a lot like the aroma, and not very pleasant at all. I kept taking sips trying to find something to like in this liqueur, but could find nothing to like at all. My tongue got as numb as my nose had earlier, and although I am a glutton for punishment I finally had enough of this and poured out the rest of the glass. I don't believe that I actually paid for this stuff. I'd give it away but that would be mean. I rarely write about bad things and prefer to think that I like to make recommendations for products that I like or that sound interesting, but I felt I had to warn other unsuspecting folks about this stuff. When I try to put my thoughts on this into one word, what comes to mind is VILE.

Flag Hill Sugar Maple Liqueur is 25% abv. / 50 proof and is produced and bottled in New Hampshire from New Hampshire maple syrup blended with General John Stark Vodka. The vodka used for the base is interesting in that it is made from apples, not grain or potatoes, and is a triple distilled spirit.

The color is that of a very light golden maple syrup. The aroma is very light and composed of a warm, caramel and toffee base, with hints of butter and sweet fruit. I couldn't detect any maple at all. the taste is very intriguing. First a mild hit of maple, followed by buttery tones and caramel that meld with the maple, changing it into a sweet, warm tasting elixir that is hard to describe, but maple isn't what comes to mind. The more I sip the more of a buttery toffee, caramel, butterscotch taste there is. It's nice, but very mild and not an overwhelming liqueur.

They more I drank, the more I liked it. It's a flavor that grows on you. I compared it side by side to the Sortilège I wrote about not long ago and while they are similar to each other they definitely have there own separate identities. If you are looking for a nice liqueur that is different from most then you should try Flag Hill Sugar Maple Liqueur.

Santa Teresa Orange Rhum Liqueur is 40% abv. / 80 proof and is made in Venezuela. Santa Teresa makes some of the finest rum in the world. Their Santa Teresa 1796, a fifteen year aged rum, is one of the best rums I have ever tasted. I first tried it a few years ago when I was spending some time in Los Rouqes. A group of islands off the coast of Venezuela that is known as one of the best scuds diving spots in the world. The sea there is an intense turquoise color that has to be experienced to be believed and after a day there spent out on the water I would have a sundowner of Santa Teresa 1896 on the rocks to unwind.

So it was with great pleasure to see a bottle of their orange liqueur on one of my favorite liquor stores shelves. Santa Teresa rum AND Oranges in a liqueur? I couldn't wait to try it. A little research showed that the liqueur is made with two year old rum that then has orange peel added to the casks and macerated for an additional length of time to infuse the flavors.

The color is a deep amber with almost a burnt orange tinge. The aroma starts off with the unmistakable smell of Santa Teresa rum. A rich, bold, sweet and smooth rum scent, overlain with complex orange notes. Then hints of sweet, ripe fruit and spices; with a salty tang that reminds me of a fresh ocean breeze. An absolutely wonderful aroma.

The taste I rich and smooth as well. A big hit of that delicious aged rum mixed with orange zest rolls across your tongue. You can taste hints of the oaken casks it was aged in as well as vanilla notes and complex spices abound. There are some nice pepper tones and a touch of bitter orange pith in the long finish that leave a pleasant, delicate, warm burn at the back of your throat that slowly fades away until you have just a memory of the taste lingering on the tip of your tongue.

American Fruits Bourbon Barrel Aged Apple Liqueur is 19.5 % abv. 39 proof and is made by the folks at Warwick Valley Winery in NY. The winery is actually better known for their authentic and tasty Doc's hard cider, then a few years ago they bought a still and started making brandies and eau de vie. I worked for awhile at a dairy farm just down the road from Warwick Winery at the time they just got their still, but was long gone when they released their line of spirits. I was at a farmers market in NY when I ran across their booth. It was late in the day and they were out of all the brandies and eau de vie, but they still had three of their liqueurs available. I got one of each and headed home. Well one thing led to another and they never got opened. Finally I have had the time to give one of them a taste.

The liqueur is like one of those interesting fortified fruit wines such as the Cranberry Smash I mentioned not long ago. They take a sweet, partially fermented hard cider and add apple brandy to it to stop the fermentation process while there is still some residual sugar and to amp up the alcohol level so that the concoction can age well. then they place it in used bourbon casks for aging and to pick up some of the bourbon and oak notes from the cask. The final result is smooth and clean.

The color is a very light gold and the aroma is light as well. A sweet scent of fresh and tart apples and a nicely aged apple cider is what you notice first, followed by hints of smoke, caramel, and bourbon.

The taste is light as well. It tastes exactly how you think it would. Cider and apple brandy, with hints of bourbon. It's very nice. My only thought is that if they could amp up all the flavors it would be a much better liqueur. It's just a little too light for an after dinner liqueur, although it wouldn't be bad as a before dinner aperitif.

J Winery Pear Liqueur is 30% abv. / 60 proof. When I was researching this liqueur I found out an interesting story about how it came about. In 1995 the present day Cellar Master of J Winery, Tom Meeker, was playing around with fermenting pears, on the grounds that would later become J Winery and Vineyard. This pear juice was slowly fermented to full dryness and then twice distilled in a copper alembic still, to produce a pear brandy that was 50% abv. / 100 proof. The pear brandy was then laid down in French Limousin oak barrels for ten years to age and was basically forgotten about. Then a couple of years ago J Winery's Winemaker, Oded Shakked, purchased the distilled pear brandy for the company J Wine to use. It was then blended with de-ionized (rain) water and liquid sugar to make the liqueur. The liqueur was then cold stabilized and aged for six more months before bottling earlier this year.

Before I tell you anything more about this liqueur I am going to tell you a story. I make my own liqueurs as a hobby and four years ago I was hired to work as the hard cider maker for an award winning cider company and orchard. While there, I learned that pears don't ripen fully until they have been chilled almost to freezing. So pears left on the tree will just keep making sugar but have no nice flavor, until they are picked and chilled. But if picked and chilled; they ripen, soften, and develop their full flavor. Rarely a frost comes about and chills the fruit before they have a chance to be picked. In this case, if the pears aren't harvested immediately, and sold right away, you end up with a load of rotten fruit.

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Sortilège Maple Syrup and Whiskey Liqueur is 30% abv. / 60 proof and is made in Montreal, Canada from Canadian whiskey and maple syrup. The color is that of a very light maple syrup.

The aroma is a light but sharp whiskey, with overtones of maple, some dried fruit and spice cake notes, and very light hints of vanilla. It's a unusual aroma that isn't as much maple as I would have thought. As I warmed it up the dried fruit notes opened up and masked all the other scents, which was an improvement since I didn't really care for the aroma that much at first.

The taste is very light and medium sweet with a light, but syrupy body. There isn't much going on with the flavor. It has hints of whiskey under the very mild maple flavor. In the background there is some of that dried fruit and spice cake that I noticed in the aroma. This is a nice, mild liqueur that is different from most, but it doesn't wow me. It's nice to have when you want something different but I wouldn't have it on a regular basis. I would like it a lot more if it just had more of the whiskey and maple action going on.

GranGala Triple Orange Liqueur is 40% abv. / 80 proof and is made in Italy with an Italian 1984 V.S.O.P brandy and the choicest oranges sourced from around the world.

The aroma is rich, warm, complex, with a pleasant blending of sweet and bitter orange notes, balanced with a fine brandy base. Balance is definitely the word that comes to mind when sniffing this liqueur. The orange is very present, but not overwhelming, and you also get the brandy notes coming through nice and solid. The color is a attractive medium orange brown.

The taste is also complex, but balanced, with many layers of flavor following each other along your tongue in waves. First you get this light flavor of oranges and brandy coursing through your mouth. Then a nice mild bitter orange taste comes along briefly, followed by a rush of brandy, then along comes a sweet orange and orange zest wave of warmth that lingers with a long finish. The brandy and orange flavors finally leave your tongue but stay with you in the back of the mouth and throat with a comforting tingling warm presence.

GranGala Triple Orange Liqueur is made with infusion and distillation methods. First, fresh, sweet orange peels (not bitter oranges) are infused in Stock 1984 V.S.O.P. brandy, then this is gently distilled with only the 'heart' of middle of the run used to make the liqueur.

In a margarita taste test conducted by the Beverage Testing Institute, GranGala scored the highest with 94 points (versus 86 points for Grand Marnier), GranGala was also judged best for orange flavor and smoothness.