Just six months ago, Buffalo Trace Distillery released a 25 year old bourbon in the Eagle Rare lineup. Now the distillery is introducing another luxurious mark to its ranks with Weller Millennium, an ultra-aged blend of straight wheated bourbon and straight wheat whiskeys.
In the year 2000, right at the start of now-master distiller Harlen Wheatley’s tenure as distillery manager, Buffalo Trace began laying down barrels of wheated bourbon and straight wheat whiskey to give a portion of those barrels a long runway for maturation. It was a move that looked to the past and paid homage to Buffalo Trace’s heritage and W. L. Weller himself.
Weller Millennium is the fruit of those efforts—the 49.5% ABV whiskey includes barrels from four different years, one of which was distilled in 2000, and the other three distilled in 2003, 2005, and 2006, making the youngest whiskey in the blend 18 years old. (The exact breakdown of vintages in the blend is as follows: 3% distilled in 2000, 50% distilled in 2003, 40% distilled in 2005, and 7% distilled in 2006.) The nose is a symphony of dried fruit, vanilla sweetness, and Heath bar; the creamy palate is a splendid continuation of these notes, and it also evokes Charleston Chew and caramel-dipped apples. For an already refined bourbon label, this is certainly a pinnacle of flavor.
If you’re able to get your hands on Millennium when it debuts in June, it’ll cost you a cool $7,500. As with the 25 year old Eagle Rare, it’s an extremely limited release, though it will be available nationally and in some global markets. The whiskey is packaged in a crystal decanter that comes with a bespoke crystal topper that is hand-etched with W. L. Weller’s “W” stamp of quality.
Typically, Weller releases are all wheated bourbons, making Millennium an outlier simply by the wheat whiskey included in the blend. It’s also among the oldest Weller whiskeys ever released—the last ultra-aged release, a 19 year old William Larue Weller that was distilled at the old Stitzel Weller Distillery in 1982, and appeared in 2001.
