The Kilchoman Spring 2010 Release
50 ml airline bottle
Tasting notes
I suppose every child remembers one of Aesop’s fables. This Kilchoman expression calls to mind the fable of the crow and the pitcher. No, it’s not the enterprise of the crow that I’m thinking of. Rather it’s the taste of the water in the pitcher. But imagine that in place of pebbles, the crow is dropping nori-wrapped rice balls into a sun-soured mead. Oh, and the crow has West Nile virus. Honey, smoke, bacon, seaweed, iodine. Cloying and powerful like mustard gas. My tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth; my septum, it seems, is no longer deviated. Sour orange with a rubbing alcohol flambée. This dram has, as the saying goes, the smell of the lamp. Yes, there is a whisper of a paint thinner off-note, but a stronger sense that Picasso is holding the business end of the brush. During his blue period.
Rating:
—On the scale of inscrutable metaphors–
The Kilchoman Spring 2010 release is “salad days”–Why is youth so described? I mean, isn’t youth better likened to an extravagance of sweets, where the initial rush gives way to unhappiness, a strangely empty surfeit, the restless sense of being neither here nor there, but always in the wrong place? Or perhaps youth is a hamburger mashed viciously against the grill by an overzealous dad, draining the meat of the fat it needs to be tolerable. Now that I think of it, perhaps “salad days” is right. You’re hungry and what is presented to you is but a prelude of what is to come.
–John
—Thanks to our good friends at Loch Fyne for helping us get our hands on this one!
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