The Dalwhinnie 25 Year 2012 Limited Edition (50 ml United Nations negotiations revivifier bottle)

Tasting notes:
     It’s the silver anniversary of 1987 (or at least it was when Diageo released this expression)! Time to celebrate the debut (1987) of Prozac in the United States! Thank goodness Dalwhinnie released a 25 year old dram to toast Prozac, Black Monday, and the succession of Alan Greenspan to Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. (Sidebar for conspiracy theorists: Surely these three things aren’t unrelated, are they?) What follows is—atypically—essentially a solo review, as apparently our MaltTranscribatrix was unable to glean anything coherent from John and Stephen’s continual gruntings like the world’s luckiest pigs being slopped with the plated leavings of the Michelin 3-star restaurant, L’Arnsbourg.
     On the nose, lemon curd flecked with toffee shavings. Or perhaps a Kurd, carrying a basket of lemons and toffee for sale? Molten creamy caramel topping on gianduja gelato at the original Grom’s in Torino. [Stephen:  Please note: Bill’s never been to Italy.] Premium velvet lining a black walnut case that held Liz Taylor’s largest diamond engagement ring. Lightly maced—in this case, with the spice, not the self-defense spray. Faint tendrils of tobacco. On the beer side of things, I incline to dark beers; brown ales, bocks, porters, stouts, imperial stouts, and so forth. The Dalwhinnie 25 seems aimed squarely at that sweet malty slice of my flavor spectrum. I think Stephen and John had already finished their glasses when I returned from the DNA-restructuring performed on me by the aromas wafting out of my glass.
     On the mouth, the world’s most expensive cheese: Pule, the Serbian donkey cheese made only at one farm in Zasavica. [John: Please note: Bill has never tried Pule, never been to Belgrade, and is, in fact, lactose intolerant.] Mild heat, toasted nut salad meat. It’s like opening a Bosendorfer grand piano on which Vladimir Horowitz played a blistering, yet whimsical, version of Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz (number 3). It’s like a 3-d printer, sintering platinum, silver, and tungsten into an amazing interlaced, interlocked, intertwined math sculpture. It’s…glorious. It’s…inexcessive Day-o, because there’s never too much Harry Belafonte. [Stephen: Bill, surely you mean “In excelsis Deo”, which, for the record, is not a song by Harry Belafonte.]
     The finish is as if a mad billionaire stole Michelangelo’s statue of David from the Accademia Gallery in Florence, planked it, turned David’s lower back into the basin of a sink, and poured bottles of Krug champagne down it, watching the swirl of the liquid as it drained through the statue onto his tiled Roman mosaic floor.

–On the scale of heavenly bodies (and no, John, it’s not Anne Hathaway)–
The Dalwhinnie 25 is the collection of all nebulae–They’re gorgeous to observe, they’re the birthplace of stars, the fragments of supernovae, and just generally awesome. As is, of course, the Dalwhinnie 25.

  

Our thanks to Leah Eagel, Alex Conway and Diageo for the sample!