Jacquin's Peach Flavored Brandy

I know that Peach Brandy doesn't really fit in with my usual MO-- you know, the hard-drinking, hard-living, gin-and-scotch chugging Bukowskian (right? right? please?)--but I'm gonna level with you folks here: my liver kinda hurts. On Sunday I polished off half a bottle of MD (it tastes less hobo-y and awful the more you drink of it), and since it's gotten warm I've been having a lot of gin and tonics and old fashioneds, and at least one day a week for the past month I've been kinda destroying myself for your amusement.

Like Battle Royale, but the explosive collar's around my liver.

What I'm saying is, I gotta take a bit of a break. Expect the next couple weeks to be no less awful, drunk, and angry, but I'm gonna be dwelling on things that just taste awful rather than things that actually physically hurt.

So with that in mind, I walked into the liquor store, seriously considered just drinking Amaretto Liqueur straight, experienced my weekly anger at the fact that the people who make Kentucky Gentleman try and make Scotch (Inver House-- coming soon!) and then just walked up to the brandy aisle and grabbed the cheapest thing they had. Let's see if my plan to not hate myself by the end of the night works.

LOOK
It actually doesn't look awful. Really deep rich color, that lovely dark-orange/mahogany tint that my favorite whiskies have. You can't tell from the look of this that it's absolutely terrible.

Then on the label it says "Caramel Color Added," so yeah, fuck this already. It's like two children in a trenchcoat, if children were bad brandy, a trenchcoat was caramel color, and my mouth was...Terminator? Fuck, I don't know. That metaphor sorta fell apart on me. Look, I seriously think I may have damaged my nerve column a little here. Roll with me.

NOSE
Christ, it smells like a goddamn hair salon. That is not a metaphor. That is not hyperbole. That is literal, objective, impartial reporting. (Christ, I'm comparing my peach brandy to my hair salon. I'm also listening to French 60's pop music. Why don't I just write my next post on how dreeeeamy Mr. Darcy is and review my favorite brands of Cosmo?)
It's an incredibly strong smell, too. Like, if you're drinking this, you can't keep it a secret from anyone (so it's like my womanliness in that way too). As soon as I started pouring, the entire room started reeking.

TASTE
This tastes like perfume. Not in the way that, say a little splash of vermouth does. This does not taste like the air in a room with an elderly matron in it, or kissing the neck of a perfumed woman (Yes. Yes, I have kissed a woman. I have a girlfriend. But she's-- she's Canadian). This actually literally tastes like perfume. In no way does this taste like actual alcohol, let alone something as rich as brandy. This tastes like a bunch of creme-saver lifesavers left sitting in a bottle of cheap white wine. It's not just sweet-- there's nothing wrong with sweet liquors; Sailor Jerry rum is one of my absolute favorite things to cowboy on a muggy evening. This is incredibly sweet, in a really thick syrupy way that alcohol logically shouldn't be.

It's like if your grandmother just emptied all the candies out of the bottom of her purse and fuckin' boiled em (only that's not how things would go down in the Moore family. It'd pretty much consist of my grandmother taking the glass away from me and pouring me a martini. My grandmother is a stroke-addled little pile of awesome).

(There was going to be an illustration, but the second result for "awesome grandmother" is hand-drawn incest porn. So thanks, Internet. Now nobody gets anything.)

It's not just sweet, but candy-sweet, artificially sweet in a way that nothing that gets you drunk--or that you drink, period--should be. It's less like a peach flavor than the syrup from canned peaches. That said, it is probably the most out-and-out drinkable of anything I've reviewed so far. If you don't mind the pure unnatural wrongness, you could use turn to this when you're really desperate and just need to get something.

Oh goddamnit.

FINAL THOUGHTS
There's a scene in The Virgin Suicides (I got a soft spot for that film, I won't-- dammit. Seriously. I'm- I'm- oh just fuck it) where a teenage boy takes a big swig of peach brandy and then kisses his prom date with a mouthful of it.

If it was Jacquin's, it might help explain that whole "mysterious suicide" thing.