Staring at a bottle of Wild Turkey Generations, and considering its $450 price tag, it’s a little hard to know what to say. It was just a month ago, that I wrote the following about the second release in Wild Turkey’s Single Rickhouse series:
When it comes to novelty in the bourbon world, there’s always going to be a price tag that comes along with it. A big price tag. The Russell’s Reserve Single Rickhouse series is proof of that, being an outlier in the Wild Turkey/Russell’s lineup that is at least partially defined on a daily basis by offering some of the best pure value on the whiskey shelf–look no further than the heroic work done every day by Wild Turkey 101, Russell’s Reserve 10 or Rare Breed. But the last few years have also seen the company–or at least its Campari ownership–seemingly waking up to the soaring MSRPs it can charge in this era of bourbon limited release hype, and that has meant big jumps for the likes of the Master’s Keep annual releases, or Russell’s Reserve 13 Year, which somehow debuted at an MSRP of only $70 in 2021. Suffice to say, those days are now long gone just a few years later.
In that moment, I was writing about the difficulty of rationalizing the $300 cost of the Single Rickhouse Camp Nelson F, which turned out to be a fantastic bourbon. I didn’t even know that a month later, I’d be sampling another WT release that was a further 50% more expensive. In the moment, I wouldn’t have even thought that was possible! And yet here we are.
Suffice to say, if WT’s Campari ownership wanted whiskey geeks to sit up and take notice of their premiumization efforts, they’ve done exactly that with these last few releases. There’s no way you can sugarcoat a number like $450. There’s almost no way to rationalize it by discussing what is in the bottle, either. Back in 2020, the 17-year-old, cask strength Master’s Keep release of Wild Turkey Bottled in Bond had a sticker price of $175. Today, a significantly younger bourbon blend is $450. Times have clearly changed.
And it’s a shame, because Wild Turkey Generations–beyond being delicious–has one of the coolest stories that the company has ever used as the basis for a limited edition release. What we have in this bottle is a significant moment in the history of the company, the lighting of a new “Russell” torch as the third generation of Wild Turkey blenders steps to the plate to take on his share of the family legacy. Generations is the first bottle in company history to be blended as a collaboration between not just father-and-son Master Distiller duo Jimmy and Eddie Russell, but also Eddie’s son Bruce, now an Associate Blender in the company. One imagines that this is more or less the first concrete, public step in the process that could lead Bruce Russell to become the next Wild Turkey Master Distiller a few decades from now. But this profoundly important aspect of Wild Turkey Generations is all too likely to be overshadowed by discussion of its soaring MSRP, easily the highest in company history. Is this the highest they can possibly go? Or will we be talking about another, $600 bottle in a couple months? Granted, at least this isn’t Buffalo Trace’s upcoming $10,000 release of Eagle Rare 25 Year.
But now let’s turn our gaze to what is actually in this bottle. This is a blend of 9-, 12-, 14-, and 15-year-old bourbon presented at cask strength: Notably, the final strength of 60.4% ABV (120.8) is actually the highest ever in a Wild Turkey-branded release, thanks to the company’s lower barrel entry proof. Each bourbon was chosen for inclusion by a different Russell, or as the company puts it: