A New Chicago Cocktail Comes With a Side of Virtual Reality

At Baptiste & Bottle, a new cocktail offers way more than just a tasty buzz. Before you even start drinking the cocktail served up at this Chicago bourbon bar, you'll have to enter virtual reality, as we learned from Time Out Chicago.

The Macallan Rare Journey cocktail, which costs $95, involves a long process of smelling plants, tasting sherries and whisky, listening to a brief history lesson, and donning an Oculus Rift.

First, the bartender comes to your table, presenting a wooden tray with three empty glasses surrounded by moss and vegetation meant to evoke the oak forests from which the wood for Macallan's casks is sourced. Then you get tastings of sherry (the casks are used for sherry before becoming whisky barrels) and Macallan Rare Cask Scotch, a single malt Speyside whisky that retails for more than $200 a bottle.

Then you strap on your Oculus to enter a virtual reality journey recreating the whisky-making process, taking you from oak forests, vineyards, and sherry warehouses to the Macallan estate in Scotland. When you take off the goggles, the bartender has finished pouring your final cocktail.

By the time it's over, you're basically a Scotch expert. That means you can justify spending $95 on one drink, right?

[h/t Time Out Chicago]