Reviews
Reviews of spirits, wine, and beer (and various errata like mixers and garnishes) comprise more than 80% of the content at Drinkhacker, and here you’ll find the entire Drinkhacker review archive in one place. Products are rated on a letter-grade scale that should be familiar to most, with F as our lowest, “failing” grade and the very rare A+ as our top score.
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Notes on Grading
How to Analyze, Score, and Review Whiskey
For three years now, the good folks at Gallo have hunted for the best artisan foodstuffs to pair with their wines. This year, seven winners were chosen, and the company was good enough to send some samples along with a bottle of their 2006 Gallo Family Sonoma Reserve Pinot Gris as a pairing. Both snacks…
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Club drinks are a mixed bag, but in a canon that includes some awfully weak entries, X-Rated is possibly the best thing going. At 34 proof, it’s light enough to go down easy on its own. Almost too easy, really. It’s sweet, light, full of fruit, and so hot pink you’ll think you were drinking…
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On paper, Mascarade sounds pretty interesting, as fruity mixers go, I mean: Peaches and apricots from France, Armagnac, and vodka. Not sure about mixing Armagnac and vodka but, sure, maybe this is just the upscale alternative to Southern Comfort that the market needed. I wish it was so. Mascarade just didn’t work for me. On…
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With its sun-and-cloud logo and baby blue color scheme, what would you expect from the 80-proof Cirrus Vodka? Something light, summery, perhaps partly cloudy even. Well you can’t judge a book by its cover nor a vodka by its bottle: Cirrus is serious stuff, heavy duty vodka that, if I didn’t know it was from…
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José Peñín’s pets probably know more about Spanish wine than I do: It’s a complicated region to get a grasp on, hindered by a difficult-to-understand collection of wine regions (68 of them are formally recognized, and there are dozens of lesser regions, too), a variety of grapes not widely grown elsewhere, and the fact that…
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Another entry into the organic spirits universe, Rain (a product of Kentucky’s Buffalo Trace Distillery) is a widely available vodka that few will have trouble finding on store shelves. Pull that eye-catching blue stopper from the raindrop-shaped bottle and a sweet, perfumy aroma fills the air. Rain’s odor gave me much promise, but the taste…
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Cinco de Mayo is holiday time… oh, wait, we’ve covered that already. Let’s get right to the review, then. Don Julio’s Añejo tequila is top shelf stuff. This aged spirit has an immediate kick of vanilla, butterscotch, and Christmas spices, with a good, mellowed agave flavor that seeps into all of it. The wood is…
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Tomorrow is Cinco de Mayo. And Cinco de Mayo is holiday time. Holiday time in Mexico. While we celebrate Mexico’s victory against Napoleon’s invading force in 1862, we are encouraged to do so with quality tequila. Here’s the first of two reviews of premium tequilas, both of which are excellent choices for your May 5…
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How good can something cheap really be? When last I broached this topic I found there was some correlation between wine prices and quality, but that it was fairly weak. But that analysis doesn’t really apply to the rock-bottom pricing that rules the world of jug wines, box wines, and stuff like Oak Leaf, a…
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Ginger is one of the hottest flavors in cocktails right now, and it’s only fitting that someone has put the essence of ginger into a liqueur. Domaine de Canton is the real deal: Baby ginger steeped in cognac, bottled at 56 proof, and coming together as a spicy and flavorful monster of a liqueur that…
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