Review: Suntory Whisky Toki

Summer is the perfect season for blended whisky.  Blended whiskey can be light and refreshing.  When it gets hot a lighter blended whiskey really hits the spot.  I don't drink a lot of it but I generally enjoy it when I do.  Johnnie Walker Black Label is a stand by for me when I'm at a bar with a limited selection.  As much as I enjoy Black Label though I don't think anyone does blended whiskey better than the Japanese which is why I was so excited to try the Suntory Whisky Toki.

Suntory Whisky Toki - 43%, $45

Taste:  Initially on first sip this is sweet with the soft vanilla of the grain whisky coming through and a little apple.  Then the smoke hits, not a lot but just enuough to let you know it's there.  The smoke never really fades but this transitions to a sweet, juicy white grape.  The finish is sweet and ashy with a little lingering white grape fighting with a bit of vanilla for attention.

Conclusion:  This is a really interesting blend.  It's light but still has some boldness.  This is a good, easy drinking summer whisky but has enough boldness to keep things interesting.  I really like this and will go back for more.  The price is reasonable for the quality, this is a blend that I would have no problem stocking in my bar on a regular basis.

Good + Cheap = Value

Coming up will be my first break from brandy.  There are a lot of amazing whiskeys out there.  When it comes to bourbon there are bourbons that are very expensive and some that are very cheap.  I get just as much enjoyment from the cheap as I do the expensive.  While the special editions and limited editions get a lot of reviews one of my favorite segments tends to get overlooked: good and cheap.  Bourbon doesn't have to be old to be great, in fact the sweet spot is probably 4-10 years.  Even by 10 years bourbon is getting pretty oak forward.  I do love an older bourbon too, don't get me wrong.  I think Elijah Craig 12 (I haven't had the new NAS version yet) and Henry McKenna Bottled in Bond are both fantastic, and I have had some old and very oak forward bourbons that I quite enjoyed but as much as I enjoyed those I also have very much enjoyed some of the younger and cheaper bourbons.  Not all young bourbon is going to be great, or even very good, but a lot of it is and some of it is startlingly cheap and surprisingly available.

While I do plan to mix in whiskey (and whisky) on this blog and plan to drink all types of it (for man can not live on brandy alone) initially I plan to focus on the cheap and good for that is where value lies and these days value seems to be becoming the new true rarity in whiskey.  Coming up: value bourbon week.

Influences

I've been a whisky drinker for a long time.  Back in my early college days I was something of a vodka connoisseur.  I had the desire to taste and try numerous vodkas to really pick out the differences and nuances.  I've always had this kind of curiosity but looking back it was a much less rewarding experience trying all of those vodkas than it has been doing the same with whisky and brandy.  At the time though I had no desire to try whisky, what I had tried was bottom shelf blended American whisky and I had no reason to think whisky could be much better than that so I stuck to vodka.  Brandy was even further from my mind, I thought of brandy as sickeningly sweet with few redeeming qualities. I had no idea just how wrong I was.

I was saved by Johnnie Walker.  Sometime during college I was invited to a Johnnie Walker tasting by a friend of mine.  It was an eye opening experience for both of us and wholly converted me over to a scotch drinker. I was a dedicated Black Label drinker and to my mind it didn't get much better than that.  Much as with my prior vodka experience though I had a curiosity to try new things and this led to trying the entire Walker line and eventually branching out into single malt scotch which was a world I stayed in for a long time.

Bourbon seemed somehow inferior to scotch.  This was misplaced but was a long held belief of mine which goes back to my terrible experiences with American whisky in college.  I didn't know the difference between bourbon and blended whisky and I didn't know about the strict quality of bourbon either.  Further driving my belief that bourbon was inferior were age statements.  Most entry level scotches were at least 12 years old while that was about the high end for bourbon at the time.  Older must be better right?  I didn't understand the differences that climate had on aging or the difference that using new oak versus a used barrel would have.  What finally brought me to bourbon though was my love of bourbon barrel aged beers.  Bourbon barrel aging does something magical to beer, something that scotch barrel aged beers never seem to be able to match.  Realizing this was the impetus I needed to finally give bourbon a try.  It started with Four Roses Single Barrel and I've never looked back.

Of course my love for bourbon didn't stop with Four Roses Single Barrel, it grew from there.  Along the way though, while I continued to educate myself about bourbon, I became curious about all kinds of other spirits.  There are a lot of fantastic whiskeys in this world and I really grew to appreciate and want to try all different types from American malt whiskys to Japanese rice whisky to whatever I could get my hands on.

It was through this journey that I found what these days are my two biggest influences.  When I was living in Los Angeles I stumbled across the K&L Spirits blog and SKU's Recent Eats blog.  I'm not sure which came first but together David Drisoll (of K&L) and SKU (obviously of SKU's Recent Eats) educated me not just on whisky but on Armagnac, Cognac, Calvados and all kinds of brandy.  This was a whole new journey and what ultimately led to me creating this blog.  I got so much out of reading what both of them wrote which only increased my curiosity and led to me wanting to learn more.  But there isn't a whole lot more out there, at least not that I've found.  The spirits blogs out there really seem to be heavily whisky influenced (let's face it, even this one is going to have a lot of whisky talk) but there are few doing quality writing on the incredible modern world of brandy.  While I can't promise quality writing I can promise reviews and discussions on brandy.  I don't know that anyone will get anything out of what I write but I hope one day someone will stumble across my blog, much as I did SKU's, and decide to take a chance on their first bottle of Armagnac.