The Gordon & MacPhail Connoisseurs’ Choice Old Pulteney 19 Year 1998

700 ml freshly rebranded beauty

Tasting notes:
The nose is unmistakable: hamster shavings, foot powder, and fish oil turned into a custard cream.  For a minute I think that Colgate finally brought peanut butter toothpaste to market.  But it’s more complex than that.  We get shoe leather with aromas of the orthotic still in place.  Then coconut cream on the nose.  And lastly some burnt aspects: a child directing an imaginary symphony with a baton made from a single chop stick that got too close to the hibachi flame.  We are enthralled!  We sit up in our seats, ready to scowl at anyone who coughs in this concert hall.

The mouth is peculiar.  We silently mouth “wow” to each other so much that we begin to feel like goldfish in a koi pond.  It’s so wonderfully strange to be submerged in this aquarium.  We are curious about the oils that we are swimming through.  But more than that, we marvel at the almost effervescent aspects we are experiencing.  Are we just over the charcoal filter as it pumps out imperceptibly small bubbles?  For there’s a stinging dimension, as if a denture pill was still dissolving when you plunked out your teeth.  And yet for all of that, there are thickening dimensions of giraffe cough syrup, anchovy ghee, and custard smoked with sparked pine needles.

It will not surprise the reader to learn that this whisky has puts a new spot in my four-dimensional Experience Grid™.  [Stephen: You should see his bullet journal on this date!  He fancies himself an Edmund Hillary!]  This is a beetle in the box kind of moment, where I think about the wisdom of Wittgenstein’s admonitions about the limits of language.  But Bill starts laughing when I resort to semaphore, thinking it’s a game of charades.  (I will make a note of this insolence in my bullet journal!)  Anyway, as it opens, the tactility changes again, as if it were a cloudy session IPA.  Yup, there’s bitterness here, like a wonderful east coast IPA that they not only dry hopped but, but added tree bark, too.  The final spasms involve grapefruit seltzer, the repressed memory of sandalwood, and the tack on a pinecone. 

   

Rating:
On the scale of grammatical puzzles showing the importance of punctuation–

The Gordon and MacPhail Connoisseurs’ Choice Old Pulteney 19 Year 1998 is “James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher.”–It takes a while to figure it out.  It’s a bit of a puzzle.  It stretches lexical possibility.  But the payout is worth the journey.  And for those counting, the author turns the number of “hads” to eleven.  This great offering from G&M is turned to eleven as well.  

   

   

                                                        —John

   

   

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