The Highland Park 21

Tasting notes:
The Highland Park 21 smells like a Provence cottage’s kitchen in which a nearsighted adolescent aspiring chef misread Nana’s recipe, and mistakenly used prime rib, venison, and plums rather than stew meat and plum tomatoes, and then slow-cooked them with fennel, pine needles, sequoia bark, moonstone, and Miss America’s tiara. It’s recaramelized cotton candy waved under my nose (and winged feet) as Mercury speeds by, tossing me a complicitous wink.
     On the mouth, a tapestry woven from slippery elm and hemp, interwoven with platinum threads. A perfectly ripe cantaloupe sectioned into a copper bowl, liberally aerated by the breath of non-martyred saints. It’s a tesseract mosaic embedded in five dimensions, whose axes are sherry, bourbon, the tears of women crying at Avatar, Lite-Brite™, and sherry. (Yes, there’s a Euclidean sherry hyperplane fruitlessly—no pun intended—endeavoring to bisect 5-space.)
     Going down the rabbit’s hole: Baked apples with cinnamon, kirschwasser Molotov cocktail, and the feeling of burgeoning cavities suddenly receding to the sound of the cavalry’s retreat. The ambition to become a fully actualized human sheds all shreds of pretension, and my chakras blossom like little girls squealing with delight as Miley Ray Cyrus walks among them.

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