William Wolf bourbon more like liqueur
One of the worst things a critic can be is a curmudgeon, which is almost always an affected pose designed to pre-empt consideration. So I try to leave myself open to fresh avenues of delight, even when they appear in unlikely forms. Such as a bearded young man brandishing a whiskey bottle in the middle of a Manhattan liquor store.
Now I will admit to my prejudice: Young people in general don’t know how — or what — to drink. Whose fault this is I’ll leave to the reader to decide (mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to drink Goldschlager). But whatever the reason, our dram shop shelves are heavy these days with abominations. There are television commercials that shill unashamedly for citrus-flavored light beer and candy-flavored whiskey.
The vodka market in particular has been infected by horrifying infusions designed to appeal to people who like to be loaded but don’t care for the taste of alcohol. What kind of society produces a demand for Cinnabon Vodka (offered by Pinnacle Vodka, which
outdoes Baskin-Robbins by boasting of more than 40 flavors of its vodka, including Cookie Dough, Caramel Apple, Peachberry Cobbler, Pumpkin Pie and Strawberry Shortcake)? One that doesn’t recognize the savagery of Ronald McDonald or that Willy Wonka was a serial killer.
But that’s really none of my business, is it? People are going to continue to do things wrong no matter what I think, and as I’ve been told more than once, no one really cares about my stupid rules. All I’m saying is that I generally like my whiskey neat or with a little ice. And if you’re going to order a drink with more than three ingredients, you should accept that some people are going to talk about you behind your back. I don’t think it makes you a bad person, so if you want to make Scotch and lemonade trendy it’s all right with me.
So I really only tried the guy’s pecan-flavored whiskey to be nice. I didn’t expect to like it.
I need to backtrack a bit. Because I do use flavored whiskey. Jim Beam’s Red Stag makes a nice alternative to rye in a Manhattan (and it’s less expensive than the ryes I generally use). And when
your throat is raw, Wild Turkey American Honey or Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Honey liqueur works better than wheatgrass juice or gargling with salt water. (That’s my story; I’m sticking to it.) If you’re going to drink one of the commercially available “moonshines,” you’re probably better off drinking the apple pie varietals. (Rock Town’s Apple Pie-flavored Arkansas Lightning is one of the better ones I’ve tried.) I know good people who swear by Crown Royal Maple Finished, and there’s a hot rye — Pow-Wow Botanical Rye — that I’ve been unable to lay my hands on.
Still, I was wary. Pecan is a flavor I associate with pralines, buttery ice cream and shortbready cookies that taste like beach grit and sorrow. It is not a subtle flavor; it is not smoke or toasted oak. It is not a case of a flavor that’s already present in the whiskey being coaxed to the forefront. It is a foreign substance introduced into the whiskey, of which we are bound by common sense and patriotism to be suspicious.
Still, I enjoyed the shot of William Wolf Pecan Bourbon Whiskey (about $26 for a 750 mL bottle). Not enough to buy a bottle then and there — we couldn’t expect to finish it off in one night and to get it back to Arkansas. We’d have had to put it in our checked
luggage, an impossibility since we never check luggage — but we liked it enough to take the guy’s business card and promise him that we’d try to hunt down a bottle once we got home.
Though he assured us it was being distributed in Arkansas, we were mildly surprised to actually find it during one of our regular forays to the liquor merchant. Big as life it was, nestled there among the growing number of flavored whiskeys we routinely ignore. (That the product is available here we might count as a small victory; apparently you can’t get William Wolf in California yet.)
While the label might lead you to believe this is a pecan-infused bourbon, I taste it slightly differently. William Wolf feels more like a liqueur than a bourbon, closer to the aforementioned honey infusions or Drambuie than the hot esophageal tangle that is Knob Creek or Pappy Van’s. I would liken it to Sortilege, a liqueur made with Canadian whisky and maple syrup, for it’s both more viscous and sweeter than you’d expect a flavored whiskey to be. And it’s only 60 proof.
The bottle indicates that though it’s made using American bourbon, William Wolf is a Dutch product — dig a little deeper and it becomes apparent that this is the only product offered by this brand so
far and that the corporate intelligence behind it is Jimmy Goldstein, president of Wingard, Inc., a major importer of spirits that is best known for the beautiful swindle that is Hpnotiq, a blue phantom vodkalike substance best used as bar dressing.
But you’re not supposed to guess either the Dutch or corporate provenance. William Wolf Pecan Bourbon is designed to appeal to those caught up in the romance of American spirits: The label features a cartoon of a fedora-wearing wolf (William?) wearing a notch-lapeled suit and picking a banjo.
While it has nothing to do with the whiskey liqueur in the bottle, I want to take a moment to point out that the cartoon, obviously based on one of the few photographs of the legendary Robert Johnson, is historically problematic if the wolf is meant to portray a black bluesman in the tradition of Johnson or Charley Patton. Black blues players largely eschewed the banjo because of its prominence in minstrel shows in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — it was an instrument played mainly by clowns in blackface. Patton even said he didn’t play the banjo “because [white people] used it to make fun of me.” The banjo was seen as a joke instrument employed primarily as a “happy” novelty by string bands
to entertain white and black audiences until Pete Seeger began to rehabilitate it.
Still, if you’ll buy the Blues Brothers as the epitome of Chicago urban blues, then I guess it’s too late to care about a sharp-dressed wolf playing the banjo. Still, I’d feel better about the whole thing if Billy Wolf there was holding a 1929 Gibson L-1 or a Kalamazoo KG-14 guitar.
Anyway, we live in a world where the inauthentic is celebrated, so while William Wolf Pecan Bourbon may be more of a bourbon-flavored liqueur — personally I wouldn’t pour more than a shot glass of it at a time, although I imagine that there are plenty of clever barkeeps who could put it to good use as a secondary or tertiary cocktail ingredient — there’s an honesty to the flavor. Your grandmother would probably like it, but the only reason to deny yourself the simple pleasures of this non-cloying, simple tipple is that you’re worried what your bourbon snob buddies might think.
But it’s OK, really. Only a sworn enemy of fun — a real curmudgeon — could deny the real pleasures of this minor but distinctive liqueur.