We Tried Wild Turkey's Austin Nichols Archives 16 Year Old Tribute to Cheesy Gold Foil

The idea sat in Bruce Russell’s notebook for a decade.

Around 2015, when Wild Turkey's Master's Keep program was just finding its footing, master distiller Eddie Russell asked his son Bruce to jot down concepts for limited releases. Bruce wrote a list. Some ideas were unachievable, but one was a retro series honoring his grandfather Jimmy Russell’s incredible creations from the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties.

Five years later, a marketer from Campari, Wild Turkey’s parent company, approached Bruce, now an associate master blender, about what should follow the well-received Master's Keep. Bruce flipped back through those old notebooks and started asking whiskey-obsessed friends what they actually wanted. The answers kept circling the same vintage releases: cheesy gold foil, donut, the old 101s, Christmas ryes. The bottles people lose their minds (and wallets) over on Facebook groups and secondary markets.

So Bruce did something he says he never does. He built a PowerPoint.

“Campari didn’t fully understand the secondary market,” Bruce says. He showed them bottles from 2013 and 2015 going for multiples of their original price, proof that modern releases could carry the same gravity as the vintage stuff if the liquid and the story lined up. “If we did a retro series for Jimmy’s famous releases, it would break the internet.”

Master's Keep ran a few years longer than anyone expected, with Bottled in Bond 17 year old and Beacon proving the appetite for high-end Wild Turkey was real. After Generations and Jimmy's 70th release sent fans into parking-lot costume changes in a bid to buy second bottles, the team got behind Bruce’s pitch. Working with RJ Whittington, Wild Turkey’s global senior brand manager, Bruce shaped the project into what's now the Austin Nichols Archives Collection. It debuts this month with the Gold Foil Edition, a 16 year old, non-chill filtered 120-proof bourbon priced at $400.

The reference point is the cheesy gold foil, a vintage 101-proof Wild Turkey 12-year release from the ’80s and ’90s that collectors obsess about. (And for good reason. As part of our tasting lineup for the new 16-year, Wild Turkey gave us several pours from various cheesy gold foil bottles. Each was transcendent.) Bruce is careful about how he frames his homage. “We’re not trying to duplicate it,” he says. “Dad told me, you’ll never be Jimmy, just like I won't be Dad. You have to figure out your own thing.”

What Bruce shares with his grandfather is a palate. He grew up drinking Jimmy’s whiskeys. (Eddie’s whiskeys came later, when Bruce was already on the job.) The Gold Foil leans into the flavors Bruce associates with the bottles his grandfather made: sweet, funky, earthy, spicy, nothing subtle about any of it.

The core mashbill is Wild Turkey’s standard 75% corn, 13% rye, 12% malted barley. The blend pulls 503 barrels, roughly 90% from Camp Nelson D and E, the same warehouses that fed Russell’s Reserve 13, 15, Wild Turkey Generations, and Beacon. Gold Foil 16 year old barrels had to be “a little different from those sister barrels,” says Bruce, adding that he specifically sought bigger, bolder whiskeys that reminded him of Jimmy’s preferred profile. Batch proof at bottling came in above 140. Bruce and his blending team, including an R&D scientist and Eddie, brought it down to 120. “Our best whiskeys are all 110 to 120,” Bruce says.

To match the buttery, chewy mouthfeel of vintage Turkey, they went older. The Gold Foil is 16 years old, four years older than the 12-year cheesy gold foil it nods to. The nose was the priority. “When you open a vintage bottle, the first thing everyone says is how good it smells,” Bruce says, adding Eddie sniffed an early sample at 140 proof and assumed it was a previous release. “Best smelling thing we made in a long time,” he told Bruce.

Wild Turkey Gold Foil Edition tastes incredible. Bruce absolutely knocked this one out of the park. The nose is big and brash, full of clove, creamy vanilla, barrel and baking spices, tobacco, and a little orange zest. It’s pure vintage Turkey funk, dialed in.

The dark amber liquid is creamy, big, and bold. Buttered popcorn starts the sip, then cherry cola, sweet vanilla cream, root beer candies, and salted caramel follow. There are some funk notes that you’d pick out from any vintage cheesy gold foil, too. The sip finishes with chocolate shavings and sweet tobacco.

The packaging is full of Easter eggs for those in the know. The original cheesy gold foil label is tucked inside the tube. The Austin Nichols name, established 1855, is back on the bottle. Brendan Lamb, a painter Wild Turkey works with, took the actual Station Master's House on the distillery grounds and reimagined it as a log cabin that would’ve fit on a 1940 Wild Turkey hunt. The flying turkey from the Seventies ad campaigns wraps around the tube. There’s even a teensy bottle of Wild Turkey 101 resting on a stump. The nostalgia pull here is strong; it’s got a “Mad Men” Seventies vibe that works flawlessly.

Gold Foil Edition is the ideal lead-off for the Austin Nichols Archives Collection. As for what future series expressions could entail, Bruce is mum on specifics, though he shares that we’ll see “both bourbon and ryes, high proof, nicely aged with that in-your-face flavor.” Because he likes higher proof so much, any shot there could be a hazmat offering coming? “Never say never,” he grins. “We haven’t done hazmat; the highest we’ve gone is 128, but so long as the flavor is there, I wouldn’t be opposed.”