This week: This is the last quiet issue before Watch Week (which, starts today!). By Friday I'll be on the floor at Windup NYC, and next week's issue is going to be watch heavyyyyy.

While putting this one together, I noticed a theme I didn't plan. Almost everything this week was grown rather than built. Whiskey that spent up to 23 years becoming itself. A watch dial cut from something a mollusk made one layer at a time. And Jeremy Clarkson, trying to grow a Jaguar in a field.

Four Roses released its 19th Limited Edition Small Batch on October 10, and the early reviews are loud [1]. It's barrel strength at 109.2 proof, non-chill filtered, with about 16,800 bottles at a suggested $249 [1].

The recipe, per Distiller [2]:

Four Roses runs a 2 x 5 experiment. Most distilleries make one or two bourbons and blend for consistency. Four Roses makes two mash bills and ferments each with five proprietary yeast strains, which gives it 10 distinct recipes [1]. Read the code like this: O is the Four Roses distillery, E or B is the mash bill, S means straight whiskey, and the last letter is the yeast. The E mash bill is lower in rye than B, so it reads softer and sweeter; B is the spicier one.

Yeast is the underrated variable. During fermentation, different strains produce different amounts of esters, the compounds behind fruit and floral aromas, and of fusel alcohols and other congeners that carry spice and weight. Change nothing but the yeast and you change the whiskey.

Which is why this year's blend is so interesting. It contains the same recipe, OESK, at two ages: 14 years and 23 years [2]. Same grain, same yeast, same distillery. The only variable is nine more Kentucky summers in wood. That's about as close to a controlled experiment as a commercial bourbon gets, and the 23-year-old component is a rare look at what extreme time does to one recipe.

What the critics say. The Daily Pour scored it 96, finding vanilla bean, crème brûlée and apricot on the nose, a palate that opens sweet with toasted marshmallow and brown sugar before turning to apricot and candied orange, and a long, oaky finish that settles on toasted almond [3]. It calls the release a clear-cut contender for the best bourbon of 2026 [3]. Beverage Dynamics' Kyle Swartz gave the nose a perfect 100 for its dark cherry, prunes, raisins and old oak, but felt the palate and finish were "merely great" next to the best LESB years, while still calling it a Bottle of the Year candidate [4].

I sadly won’t be landing a bottle, or probably even tasting it. But these Four Roses are always spectacular.

Act 14 is the first Midwinter Night's Dram to see the inside of a sherry cask. High West added Amontillado, Oloroso and PX Sherry casks to the usual Ruby and Tawny Port barrels, and timed it to the distillery's 20th anniversary [5]. Same backbone, new wardrobe.

What's in the bottle. It starts, as always, with Rendezvous Rye: a blend of straight ryes aged four to 10 years [5]. Three mash bills go in [5]:

It's non-chill filtered, with no added flavor, and bottled at 49.3% ABV, or 98.6 proof [5]. That number is not an accident. High West pointed out it matches human body temperature, calling it a fitting touch for a winter whiskey [5]. SRP is $124.99, sold through High West's General Stores and website, in limited quantities across the US [5].

Five wines, three ways of aging. Port and sherry casks are not interchangeable flavor bombs. What a cask gives back depends on how the wine inside it was made.

So Act 14 isn't just "sherry added." It's fresh fruit, oxidized nut and concentrated sugar layered onto a spicy rye, and the cask staves soak up enough wine to carry each signature into the whiskey. On paper, that's the most complex finishing program the series has ever had.

And about that 98.6: a whiskey in your mouth warms toward body temperature, and warmer ethanol pushes more aroma compounds into the air above the palate. High West just bottled the idea on the label.

What others are tasting.

VinePair's take: the series may have lost some of its online buzz since the early Acts, but they argue it's every bit as good as it always was [6].

My notes.

Verdict: This one is great, and it's opened up a lot since I popped it last week. It's a buy, at the right price. I've seen it online for around $100 at Costco, and most places have it for $125 to $130. Some shops are trying to charge $150 or more. At that price, personally: do not pass go.

RGM just announced its first perpetual calendar since the Model 103-R Minute Repeater Perpetual from the 1990s [7]. For anyone who hasn't met them: RGM is Roland G. Murphy's workshop in Pennsylvania, and one of the very few American companies making serious mechanical watches.

The 501-PC is classic RGM, which is to say quiet. The layout is traditional: months and leap year at 12, date at 3, moonphase at 6, and day of the week at 9 [7]. The dial is white enamel inspired by 19th-century pocket watches, with black painted Roman numerals and blued hands [7]. Worn & Wound summed it up well: the antithesis of flashy [7].

The case is stainless steel, 39mm across and 11.5mm thick, vertically brushed on the sides with polished accents [7]. That's a genuinely wearable size for a perpetual. RGM hasn't published a lug-to-lug figure, and the lugs look a little long in photos [7].

The movement decision. Here's the part I respect. RGM didn't build the calendar in-house. It started with an ETA 2892, chosen because it's reliable and easy to service, and added a perpetual calendar module from Dubois-Dépraz [7]. RGM then reworked the automatic bridges and fitted a solid gold rotor, opening up the view through the caseback [7]. The thin module is what keeps the case at 11.5mm [7]. It's the same playbook as the Fears QP from earlier this year, and it's a big part of why high complications keep getting cheaper [7].

The science bit: how a watch knows it's a leap year. A regular date wheel advances once a day and has to be corrected at the end of every short month. A perpetual calendar does it for you, mechanically, for decades. The trick is a program wheel that turns once every four years, 48 months in one rotation. Around its edge are notches of different depths: shallow for 31-day months, deeper for 30-day months, deepest for February, with one February notch cut slightly shallower for the leap year. A lever rides that edge like a needle on a record. When it drops into a deep notch at the end of a short month, the mechanism skips the date wheel straight to the 1st. It's a four-year calendar stored as a shape.

One catch: the Gregorian calendar skips the leap year in 2100. Almost no perpetual knows that, so a 501-PC bought today will need one manual correction in about 74 years. Your grandkids' problem.

Price: $39,900 [7]. That's not small money, and the same pricing debate that followed the Fears will follow this one. But RGM's buyers have been paying five figures for years, and an enamel-dial American perpetual is a short list of one.

This one is a Windup special, so expect to see it on the floor this weekend. Venezianico designed the Redentore Two Harbors for Windup Watch Fair New York, tying the brand's Venetian roots to the fair's home city [8]. The concept is an Atlantic crossing between two cities framed by water [8].

The dial does a lot. The hours and minutes move to an off-center mother-of-pearl subdial, which frees the rest of the dial for a scene [8]:

The imagined route runs from Venice through Gibraltar, past the Azores, and across to New York [8]. The caseback is engraved with both Venice and the Manhattan skyline, so you can turn it to bring either harbor upright [8].

Specs [8]:

The science bit: why mother-of-pearl glows. I'm a biologist, so I can't let this one go. Mother-of-pearl, or nacre, is built by mollusks out of microscopic plates of aragonite, a form of calcium carbonate, stacked like bricks with thin layers of protein as mortar. Each plate is roughly the thickness of a wavelength of visible light. When light hits that stack, reflections from the layers interfere with each other: some colors reinforce, others cancel. Change your viewing angle and the colors shift. It's the same physics as a soap bubble or an oil slick, made by an animal. And because it's grown, not printed, no two subdials will look exactly alike.

Where to get it: the watch is unveiled at Windup, October 16 to 18, where visitors can see it and place advance orders, with a limited number sold at the fair itself [8]. Official launch is October 26 [8]. I’m actually in love with this one. It’s quite well executed. It’s not over the top. Venezianico has been killing it lately, and if you’re not familiar with them… You should note them.

General Motors just had its best quarter ever for internal combustion, with the Silverado widening its lead in full-size trucks [9]. In the same quarter, its EV sales collapsed 61.7% year over year, from 66,601 to 25,473 [9]. Through nine months, GM's EV sales are down 43.2%, to 82,152 [9].

EVs fell to just 3.8% of GM's US sales this quarter, down from nearly 10% a year ago [9]. Some of that drop is a mirage, though. Last year's third quarter was inflated by buyers rushing to dealers before the subsidy ended [9].

The model-by-model numbers tell the real story [9]:

Cadillac sold 12,358 EVs in the quarter: nearly half of GM's US EV total, and 38% of Cadillac's own sales [9]. Meanwhile the Equinox EV, the car that was supposed to be GM's affordable electric workhorse, lost more than nine of every ten sales [9].

The science bit: elasticity, or why the cheap EV died first. Economists call it price elasticity of demand: how much buying behavior changes when price changes. The federal credit was a flat $7,500 regardless of the car. On a roughly $35,000 compact crossover, that's about a fifth of the price. On a six-figure Escalade IQ, it's closer to a rounding error. (My back-of-envelope math, not GM's.) Take the same $7,500 away from both buyers and the budget shopper walks, while the luxury buyer barely notices. That's exactly the pattern in GM's numbers, and autoevolution makes the same point: luxury buyers rely less on subsidies [9].

Zoom out and the market looks less like a crash and more like a reset. EVs were over 11% of new car sales in September 2025, right before the credit ended, and 5.8% a month later [10]. Since then, they've held steady at roughly 5 to 6% of sales throughout 2026, according to Edmunds [10].

Jeremy Clarkson is going back to cars. Amazon has greenlit a one-off special, Jeremy Grows a Car: A Clarkson's Farm Special, coming to Prime Video in 2027 [11]. The premise: frustrated with modern motoring, Clarkson decides he won't buy a new car, he'll build one, from produce grown at Diddly Squat Farm [11].

The base car is a Jaguar F-Type V6 S, which he sees as the sweet spot between analog thrills and modern practicality [11]. Diddly leather goes on the seats, Diddly wool goes on the floor, and the body work gets a composite made from flax he'll grow himself [11]. Helping redesign it is Ian Callum, the designer who penned the original F-Type and the Aston Martin Vanquish [11]. The brief, per Amazon: a Jaguar that stands for style, luxury and performance [11]. The preview image shows Clarkson fitting new body panels to the F-Type in a "mood room" full of inspiration photos [12]. He'd already told Harry Metcalfe he wanted a wider body kit on his F-Type convertible [12].

The timing is not subtle.

The announcement landed the day after Jaguar revealed the production Type 01 in New York [12][14]. That's a four-door electric grand tourer with three motors, up to 757 kW, a 118 kWh battery, no rear window, and a target squarely on Bentley and Rolls-Royce [14]. Clarkson's "what Jaguar should stand for" pitch, rebuilding a gas F-Type with the man who designed it, reads like a reply. Car Throttle put it plainly: given where Jaguar is now, it's a conversation worth having [13].

It's also the first proper car-focused Clarkson project since the last Clarkson, Hammond and May episode of The Grand Tour aired two years ago; the show has since relaunched with new hosts [13].

The science bit: can you really grow carbon fiber? Sort of. Flax fibers are bundles of cellulose, the same polymer that holds plants upright, laid down in long, aligned strands. Soaked in resin and cured, they make a composite that is much lighter than glass fiber for similar stiffness per kilogram. Carbon fiber is still far stiffer and stronger outright, so flax won't replace it in a chassis tub. But for body panels, it has two tricks. Plant fibers damp vibration better than carbon, so panels ring less. And when a flax panel breaks, it tends to crack rather than shatter into sharp shards, which is why it's turned up in racing body panels. The plant also pulled carbon dioxide out of the air while it grew.

Outro: That's the week: a whiskey bottled at body temperature, a bourbon with a 23-year-old hiding inside it, a perpetual calendar from Pennsylvania, a seashell dial that sailed from Venice, and a Jaguar that's going to start life as a crop.

If you're in New York this weekend, come find me at Windup. Next issue, I'll bring you everything worth seeing from the floor, and by then we'll finally know what Tesla's Roadster actually is.

Until then: pour something patient, wear something with a story, and drive something you actually understand.

Cheers, Mark