Wilderness Trail 10 Year Old 10th Anniversary Bourbon Review

By Richard Thomas

Rating:

Upon returning to Kentucky in November 2016, I spent a few months catching up with the bourbon industry. Of course, during my eight year stint in Europe, I would call on various distilleries whenever I was visiting the family in the Bluegrass, but there was never enough time on any given visit to knock out the entire to-do list. My return and relative idleness meant I could attend to that, and part of that to-do list was visiting with Wilderness Trail.

It was a propitious time, because they had only recently gotten their current distillery, set up on a farm outside of Danville, up and running. Indeed, they had also just recently changed their name from Wilderness Trace to Wilderness Trail, to avoid any trademark disputes a certain other distiller also using the name “Trace.” Prior to this, whiskey industry chemistry and engineering duo Shane Baker and Pat Heist had been running a true micro-distillery: their set up was such that, as they told it, putting in a twelve hour day with their pot still would get their fermented sweet mash distilled and into a single barrel fill. They were, essentially, running a weekend hobby distillery and filling one or two barrels per week.

It is a far cry from today’s set-up, which is producing over 200 barrels per day and was acquired by Campari last year, but that phase of the company history matters because we’re looking at a 10th anniversary bottling. Thus, it was distilled in 2013, and just so happens to come from only the second-ever barrel Baker and Heist filled back when the pair were working with a small pot still in what was essentially a rented storage unit in Danville.

That second barrel fill was done in the aforementioned sweet mash style, meaning there was nothing held back from the previous mash; each batch starts from scratch. That mash is a wheated one: 64% corn, 24% wheat, 12% malted barley. They chose to bottle this very limited release at 100 proof, and at that rate Wilderness Trail estimated the barrel would yield about 115 bottles (the estimate was made prior to release, and hasn’t been updated since).

The Bourbon
The pour takes on a deep red tint to its amber, so much so that I think it reaches beyond a good brew up of tea and almost goes into red ale territory. It is a remarkable color, really. It isn’t Big Red ruby, but the brown in the amber is really just a suggestion.

Speaking of red, the nose smacked of red fruits and raisins plus brown sugar and vanilla, with notes of a baking spice mix that had an extra large helping of nutmeg stirred in. Behind all this was a hint of musty wood. The palate lead with that classic bourbon, brown sugar and vanilla character, but this was swiftly swamped under a burst of fat dried cherries and oak. On the finish, the sweetness and fruitiness disappear, leaving behind a fast fading touch of oak.

I imagine this will be a hard bottle to find at anything like a reasonable price. Yet if you can snag one at a not-painful price point, do so for its combination of quality and uniqueness.

The Price
These bottles were priced at $280 each at the time of release.