High West Rendezvous Rye – from 2015!

HIGH WEST RENDEZVOUS RYE
Batch 15H11 (2015)

MASH BILL – Blend of MGP’s 95% rye /5% malted rye and Barton’s 80% rye / 10% corn / 10% malted barley

PROOF – 92

AGE – NAS (blend of 6-year MGP and 16-year Barton according to High West)

DISTILLERY – High West Distillery

PRICE – $70

WORTH BUYING? – Oh yes!

I’ve never been too into High West. Their products are expensive. They do a lot of sourcing and finishing, two practices I have nothing at all against. Quite the contrary. But High West’s results have seldom wowed me, and for their prices I’d prefer a whiskey to make more of an impression.

I had only just started getting into whiskey right around when the bottle featured in this post came out. By 2018 I was long since all in, and High West had shifted away from purely sourcing to also bottling their own distillates—which instantly made the pre-2018 releases coveted by High West aficionados.

Then recently I spotted this bottle, cloaked in a dusty shawl, perched high up on a corner shelf in a tiny downtown San Francisco shop. I could barely reach it to pull it down and get a closer look at the fine print. A 2015 bottle? Priced at a fairly normal $64 before tax? Why not?

When I cracked it open later that night, I was immediately impressed. From the nose to the taste and on into the finish, classic young MGP herbal rye spice notes paired with classic old Kentucky cherry and oak notes. The two sourced whiskeys in the blend did not taste integrated, rather they seemed to stand confidently side by side. This was not a flaw. A gorgeously syrupy texture held them both up, and I enjoyed their distinctive personalities like a great duo singing in harmony. Think Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett in their jazz collabs.

So here we are, a week and a half after uncorking and a handful of pours into the bottle. These brief notes were taken using a traditional Glencairn.

COLOR – soft medium oranges with burnt amber and brass highlights

NOSE – dill, caramel, vanilla, baking spices, doughy pastry, oak, a sweet cherry fruit rollup

TASTE – very true to the nose, with a syrupy texture that helps emphasize the caramel and eases the cherry rollup toward cherry pie

FINISH – the dill and other spices return, alongside oak, subtle bitter oak tannin, faint cherry, and a bit of chocolate

OVERALL – a very easy to sip, herbal, sweet rye whiskey

Yep. I really enjoy this. The component whiskeys are tasting a bit more integrated to me now, which is neither a gain nor a loss. The 6-year MGP stands out most prominently. But the 16-year Barton stands firmly just beneath it, offering a grounding foundation for the bright spiciness of the MGP to dance on.

And that syrupy texture! So good. For a 92 proof whiskey this sure is viscous. And it really helps support the cherry and caramel notes in particular, and to bring the pop of oak and rye spices around to the color’s softer effects.

I understand High West wanting to shift over to its own distillate. The current recipe blends MGP’s famous 95% rye / 5% malted barley recipe with High West’s own 80% rye / 20% malted barley distillate, with an age range of 4 to 7 years. I’ve not had it and can’t speak to it. But those new specs are radically different from what I’m tasting here. And I do like what I’m tasting here. It’s easygoing enough, interesting enough, and on a purely sensory level tasty enough, to keep me reaching for the glass again and again.

Now, why write about this 2015 bottle in 2024? One reason is that maybe you too will come across a derelict 2015 bottle at some shop—or a 2016 or 2014 bottle, which one can reasonably assume might taste similar—and, having read these notes, you might be compelled to give it a go. 

But most likely, notes on a 2015 bottle of whiskey written nine years later serve merely to satisfy a whiskey fan’s habitual curiosity about past releases. And a reason to be curious about past releases, I would say, is not to determine whether things were better back then versus now. To a large extent that’s a bit of a moot point—then is then, now is now. Nothing to be done about it.

A more compelling reason to be curious about past releases, I believe, is the “history in a bottle” aspect of whiskey. Once that bottle is initially corked tight, its aromas and flavors are frozen in time. Uncork it for the first time a week later or a hundred years later and it will taste the same. So tasting a bottle today that was corked ten or twenty or fifty years ago gives us a chance to literally touch something of that time in our present moment—the grains grown then, the water that ran through rivers then, the oak trees felled and cut into lumber for barrels in the climate as it was then. Old whiskeys don’t help us to understand history better in any literal way. But they can certainly compel our curiosity about the past, about how things evolved over time to what they are in the present, and how life might continue to evolve on into the imagined future.

Knowing this bottle of Rendezvous Rye was bottled in 2015, that part of the blend was distilled roughly around 2009 and the other around 1999, and that now I’m tasting it in 2024? Well that gives me twenty-five years to consider. What was I doing in 1999—the final year of the twentieth century? Where was I in life ten years later? Another six years on? And now? How have the world and I changed over a quarter of a century, and what has remained as ever?

Behind this bottle on that high corner shelf where I found it were three more, but all from 2016. I hesitated to go back and snap them up, given 2016 was one step closer to 2018, when High West upended their Rendezvous Rye recipe. Would there be less of the older Barton in the 2016 as in the 2015? But my rabbit holing down the www for reviews of the 2016 batches seemed to turn up notes similar to what I get from this 2015. And so one of those 2016 bottles now lives in my bunker!

And then—I found a 2014 bottle at a whole other store! Bought it.

When it rains it pours, and then I pour a glass. 😉

Cheers!