Once upon a time when I enjoyed whiskey, I was introduced to bourbon. I quite recall enjoying it immensely. However, interestingly enough, I don’t believe that I had ever had Maker’s Mark. In my 20’s, it seemed to be one of those drinks that you had to mentally prepare for on some level. In my 30’s, I had become enraptured in scotch so it wasn’t on my radar so much. By my mid 40’s, nothing was on my radar anymore :-). With that said, I have engraved a fair amount of Maker’s Mark over the last year. It’s really a cool bottle to engrave…especially the “46” bottle. For us engravers, it’s almost a gift. The bottle designers have graciously provided all of this empty real estate and these particular bottles were presented with the labels removed. Even better.
On this bottle, I was asked to etch first and last names for an event. I had initially planned to go with my usual size of script lettering on wine & spirit bottles with the x-height at roughly 1/6”. However with all of that space dead center in the middle of the bottle, I thought “no, if we are going to do it, then let’s do it.” I decided to make the x-height closer to 1/4”. I think that that was the right call. It gave the lettering a slightly bolder look to go with the feeling that this brand evokes.
So of course, I knew nothing about the Private Selection prior to engraving these bottles. I found a little information about it on their website:
At Maker's Mark, our wood-finishing series was created to explore new, unique expressions of our signature whisky. Beginning as fully matured Maker's Mark® at cask strength, Private Selection is created by adding 10 custom wood finishing staves to each barrel. It's then aged in our limestone cellar to extract a unique, flavorful taste profile. Participants in this special barrel program get their say in the selection of these wooden staves. The finishing staves can be any combination of five flavor profiles chosen especially for this program. With 1,001 possible stave combinations, each expression of Private Selection has a customized finish and taste profile that is unique, yet undeniably Maker's®.
