Next time, he can treat him to one of these.
Yeah, BIL ain’t getting any gift bottles of Pappy Van Winkle from me, unless I win the lottery or something. And even then, I’d probably just buy a bottle for myself and maybe let him try it 
I agree with some of the others that this was a bit rude.
When someone gives me a gift I am not entirely thrilled with, I am 100% disingenuous. I never give the slightest hint that I am not completely happy with it.
Generally speaking, of course. I suppose there are some special circumstances where I would need to be honest about my dissatisfaction. But a bottle of wine or liquor? Thank you, thank you, thank you. (And then I will give it away or pour it down the drain the next day if it’s something I abhor.)
When I got married, the first xmas my in-laws gave me a sweater. It was a very nice, expensive looking sweater. The thing is, I absolutely never wear a sweater. Just thinking about sweaters makes me itchy. So, I thanked them profusely for the sweater and never took it out of the box.
Fast forward a year. Another sweater. Then another and another. Fifteen consecutive years I got a sweater from them for xmas. I always thanked them, they never saw me wear a sweater.
Again, as I explained in the thread a couple times already, I was not trying to portray BIL as rude; I mischaracterised him in my OP. I mean, this is a guy who has given me pours of several of his favorite bourbons in the past, describing what he liked about each one. Also, he gifted me his favorite bourbon (Woodford Reserve) last Christmas. So I didn’t mind at all a genuine opinion of a bourbon I gave him. I may have even asked for an honest appraisal from him.
If Woodford Reserve is your BIL’s go to bourbon, then he’s not really a bourbon connoisseur and collector. He’s a bourbon drinker. Real bourbon collectors drink among other things: Old Carter, Kentucky Owl, A.H. Hirsch, etc.
I wouldn’t say it’s his all-time favorite, more his favorite all-around dependable mid-priced bourbon. I doubt wine connoisseurs open $200+ bottles of wine every time they feel like a glass, unless they’re Johnny Depp.
That’s a really good idea.
In general, I think giving connoisseurs/obsessive collectors something specific in their area of interest is bound to result in disappointment to someone involved. It’d be like me gifting an orchid fancier with a Cattleya I found in a catalog.
Yes and no. In matters of food and drink, I hate gift cards (well, to a restaurant is okay, but I wouldn’t want a gift card to a liquor store.) Now, this may just be me, but the fun of getting a gift is the surprise and the chance to try something you ordinarily would not. I have had a terrible time buying $100+ bottles of whiskey because, well, there’s better things I can spend that money on, and I’m just stingy about buying for myself. For others? Sure. I bought my brother a $200/lb A5 Wagyu strip steak for Christmas. I would never buy that for myself. And my brother buys for me $100+ bottlings of Ardbeg Uigeadail or some Bruichladdich I’ve never had before or whatnot. If it’s something I’ve never had before, that’s the perfect gift for me. If I got a $100 gift card to the liquor store, I’d probably just end up buying cheap (but drinkable) bottles of wine or a bunch of 6-packs and likely not try anything new.
That could be my idiosyncrasy, though. On the other hand, we do have very good insight and understanding of each others’ tastes. There are categories of gifts I would never buy for him, like electronics. I’m a photographer and he would likely never buy for me anything photography-related, because I’m pretty specific about what I need. (Though there are some fun “gadgets” that could work as gifts.)
It may be just your idiosyncrasy, but I’ll accept that I may be the weirdo. I love getting gift cards. My relatives and friends want to get me something I want - musical instruments! But most don’t know musical instruments from shinola, they don’t have any idea what a good deal is for a musical instrument, they don’t know what I want, they don’t know what I already have, and for them to coordinate on the purchase of one of the larger items would be a loony burden in getting me a gift. So gift cards are really ideal for this situation.
In fact, I just cashed in a bunch of gift cards to buy a used synthesizer that does vocoding. I saved at least $100 because they listed it as a “vovoder” instead. I love it, my wife asked “Is that all it does?” when I demonstrated it for her. Well, it does an OK human chorus and really passable strings for an analog synth, but I bought it for the really nice analog robot voices. So, I’m pretty sure without gift cards I would have hesitated for a long time, and no one would have gotten me it.
On the other hand, my BIL can buy me any whiskey he wants to. He’s wayyyy more of a snob than I am. and specific (only buys stuff from Kentucky, he’s from there), knows what I like, and won’t waste his money buying stuff he’s just taking a chance on. The last bottle he picked for me was a bottle of New Riff Malted Rye, which was excellent. I need to grab myself a new bottle of it.
Pappy is a holy grail only because the bourbon collector community is collectively insane. Once upon a time, the brand made their reputation because they happened to hold a substantial number of barrels of wheated bourbon from a long out of business distillery. During the 80s bourbon glut, they couldn’t give it away. So it just sat, aging nicely until the first blush of the bourbon renaissance in the early 2000s, by which time it had aged very nicely and the weak barrels had been culled and disposed of. I used to be able to buy it right off the shelf at MSRP because it was so aggressively unfashionable.
Here comes 2010 and all of a sudden, through careful marketing and a few well orchestrated remarks by folks like Anthony Bourdain, it’s on fire. Everyone wants it. Trouble is, the limited number of barrels that Julian Van Winkle was sitting on are now all gone. So Buffalo Trace steps up, and starts putting Van Winkle labels on bottle of Old Weller and everyone pretends that’s the same thing. Newsflash: it ain’t.
And that, in a nutshell, is a problem with the whole bourbon industry. The glut of the 80s and 90s meant that the product of 2010 was the best of the best of the best of what was lurking in the rickhouses. But that’s all gone now, so we get an ever growing expanse of ‘premium’ bottlings of what is effectively horse piss compared to the bounty of goodness of 15 years ago.
Sorry, let me gather up my soap box and wander off in search of aged Armagnacs or whatever the ‘next’ thing is now. Oh, and get off my lawn while you’re at it.