I’m tired of the gaslighting. Distillers who make a traditional and strictly defined spirit are ever in search of new markets and curious drinkers, and I want them to succeed. But for the love of god, stop aging shit in bourbon barrels and acting like you’ve invented the goddamn wheel.
If you listen to them, it’s like they’re doing us a favor by boldly going where nobody else dared, all for the sake of flavor. Martell, for example, says its Blue Swift is “an audacious combination” and describes the taste as “a sensation of fullness and generosity.” This level of self-congratulation is indulgent even for boiler-plate marketing copy.
Most people might not know it, but the use of ex-bourbon barrels by non-bourbon producers is really a marriage of convenience. In the United States, bourbon, by Federal Law, must be aged in new oak barrels. The key word there being new. Imagine how much you’d need to pay out of pocket—you as just a regular person—for a wooden barrel that doesn’t leak. For that reason, almost all of the major US bourbon distilleries have cooperages where they’re making barrels in bulk all day long. And they can only be used one time.
“I think the Martell Blue Swift is really an just experiment to see if you can tie a bow around young, decidedly not great spirit. ”
So what then? You’d be right if you assumed they don’t dump out the bourbon and chop the barrels down for firewood. Rather, they’re sold off to scotch producers and whoever else wants to use them as what the industry calls a “first-fill” cask, meaning that now whoever fills up the barrel with their distillate (or even wine or beer) gets the residual flavor of bourbon. But once that stuff is bottled, the barrel still has utility, and so it becomes a second or a third-fill barrel, though it imparts less residual flavor each time.
Normally cognac is like bourbon in the sense that legally it needs to use a new barrel made from French oak as a requirement of production. That’s quite the bottleneck. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could give a middle finger to the rules and put your distillate into used barrels? Well, of course.
With the Blue Swift, Martell is having its cake and eating it, too. It legally can’t call this brandy-in-a-bourbon-barrel product a cognac, so it calls it a “spirit drink,” and relies on its reputation as a major cognac producer to have consumers connect the dots in their own minds.
I should mention at this point that I don’t dislike bourbon barrel aging because it’s somehow sacrilegious or because the rules of cognac production are particularly sacrosanct. In general I dislike it because it tends to result in a lot of samey shit where bourbon is used to pave over production faults. And so it is here.
At its best, the Blue Swift has a vague vanilla and corn-funky sweetness. At times there’s even a successful interplay between the sweetness and peppery nature of a bourbon and the lush fruit of a good cognac. Not as good as a solid bourbon, mind you, nor as good as even a middle-tier cognac. If this were the best of the half-and-half approach, it would simply be mediocre.
No, it’s the rest of the experience that makes me think Blue Swift is really an experiment to tie a bow around young, decidedly not great spirit. The aroma is equal parts aggressive and unusual. The rawness of the stuff kicks you right in the nostrils, and nice flavors like clove and coconut compete with industrial odors and sour dairy.
As for the taste, it comes on weak and undifferentiated and develops into a fight between the barrel char from the bourbon and the fruit from the cognac. I don’t want to deal with the bracing oak tannins to get to the plum. The spirit finishes more softly than I would have anticipated, given what comes before, but an acrid bitterness wears out its welcome.
Here’s my suspicion: when you throw out some of the rules going from making cognacs to making “spirit drinks,” you can throw out all of them, including the ones that require you to say (even roughly) how long you’ve aged the cognac for. The ham-handed bourbon finishing is probably being tasked with eliminating the off-notes common to young hooch, and I don’t think it does a particularly good job.
And all this at $40? Woof.
Given that spend, you’d be much better advised to buy a very good bourbon and a very good Martell cognac for about the same price as Blue Swift’s MSRP. And if you get a wild hair up your ass, you can even mix the two together and create your own audacious combination spirit drink. I haven’t tried that, but it’s bound to be better than this stuff.
