April Trip - Arrival Day

[Skinsfan1311]

We made It!  Please excuse the typos, doing this from from my phone.

 

We flew in from Baltimore, landed in Louisville, at 10:30 and headed straight

to Wallace Station for lunch. It was ~ an hour drive from the airport. Once you hit the back roads,  the countryside is beautiful, rolling hills, horse farms, etc.

 

The weather was perfect. It was sunny & 72°  I can highly recommend Wallace Station. The food was fantastic. 

We had time to kill, before our Woodford Reserve tour, so we hit the Rebecca Ruth Candy Museum.  With all due apologies to those who recommended it, we were underwhelmed. It smelled wonderful, and the people were friendly but, it's basically a dirty old house and the tour was lame. Not sure how this place passed health inspections.

On to the good. Woodford Reserve.  I'm not a big WR guy, but I do keep a bottle on hand.  The setting is idyllic, the distillery is surrounded by rolling hills and horse farms. The facility is beautiful. They have a gift shop that offers different types of bottles of Woodford Reserve, but nothing that I can't buy at home, except for the Kentucky Derby labeled bottles. The tour was very good. He gave us a short talk at the visitors center,  then we loaded up on a bus and they took us down to the distillery.  It smells so good in there, from the yeast. Since everyone in the group had been on distillery tours before,  he didn't go into the distillation process too much, but concentrated on the how the grains affected the process, and answered questions. We checked out the copper stills and the bottling plant,(it wasn't running, there were bottles on it, but they were having some kind of issue that they were working on). We saw where they filled the barrels, and the guide explained how that worked.

 

After that, we hit the rickhouse. Oh Man!  It smelled wonderful!!!  He answered more questions, then we headed back to the visitors center, for our tasting. It was kinda cool. They have a large rectangular bar, that was set up with place settings that included two glasses with WR & WRDO,  along with ice buckets,water pitchers and a bourbon chocolate. They were small, but adequate pours. He explained the tasting process, flavor profiles, etc.

Overall, it was a great tour, the people were friendly, the site is beautiful. I can highly recommend it.