The Compass Box Flaming Heart 2012 Limited Edition
750 ml Nor'easter survival bottle
Tasting notes:
On the nose, this dram offers you spun platinum wheat amazing tropical fruit woven together in the most enticing way. Imagine Rapunzel living in a tower on an organic heirloom wheat farm growing an unbelievable strain of wheat, the seeds of which covert ops teams from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault have been dispatched to procure–at any cost. Now imagine that she dreamt of being a blonde Carmen Miranda and that she was practicing in her tower room as you pleaded for her to let down her hair–and she forgot to take her hat off before she granted your request. Oh, and you’re in madly love with her. As you climb those golden wheat-fed tresses, you pass a banana here, a kumquat there, a pink grapefruit, a white grapefruit, a grape pinkfruit, a great whitefruit (LOOK OUT!), and, improbably enough, eggs from chickens fed on an all fruit diet by a macrobiotic fruitarian (yielding Svend’s Scurvy-Free Free-Range Huevos Gigantes®). But there are also coconuts on the nose, specifically, the coconuts worn by a hippo as a bra, sold in South Africa under the brand name Hippo Nipples™ (in Botswana as Hipples®). And did I mention the peat? This is highly specific peat, so specific one can smell the twigs in it. In musical terms, it’s “Smell the Twig”, the B-side of “Smell the Glove”. Yes, it’s that special.
On the mouth, there’s also sweetness: marzipan straight razors used to give Brazilians to supermodels who ate only fruit. And meatiness: a kickass roast beef sandwich with horseradish and, redundantly enough, with au jus. And happiness: the joy of witnessing your son being born into a recently emptied Clynelish barrel. And more wood: it’s that dream where you’re inside the only Stradivarius cello during the Bach solo, and you can’t say anything, lest you ruin the performance (the obverse of the showing-up-for-school-with-no-pants-on dream). And wonder: a 10 year-old boy watching I Dream of Jeannie, wondering what it would be like to be in the bottle with Barbara Eden.
The finish is fast and uncomplicated at first, but then…oh my: roasted root vegetable and smoked gouda. Actually, it’s triple cream smoked gouda, thus breaking basic cheese laws and laws of common sense (to go on and smoke such a thing). It’s also like attending a controlled burn forest fire after tailgating for six hours with a sponge fresh out of its cellophane wrapper and a case of Terry’s Dark Chocolate Oranges.
Leave it sitting in your glass for ten minutes and…well…you’re an idiot.
The Compass Box Flaming Heart is the line from Samuel Beckett’s play, Krapp’s Last Tape: “Not with the fire in me now.”–I know, I know. You don’t get it. That’s the point. But trust me: as references go, it’s fantastic.
–Our thanks to Robin Robinson and Compass Box for the sample!
You know what, there are other whisky anoraks who also happen to be literary geeks 😉 Excellent play and excellent reference.
Glad to find another literary geek in whisky anorak form! So you don’t think we were getting overly pretentious here, I didn’t mean that few would get the reference to Krapp’s Last Tape, though I suppose that’s true enough. The reference few would get that the rating contemplates in this case had to do with something (else) specific between us and Compass Box folks that touched on Krapp’s Last Tape–so something even more obscure (or an inside story) than knowing about the play and that line in context.