The Ardbeg Blasda

Tasting notes:
From the moment the first waft of the nose hits yours, you’ll realize that this dram is a wonderfully peculiar dram, designed to befuddle, bedraggle, and bedevil a very particular kind of good friend whom you’re more than happy to so befuddle, bedraggle, and bedevil.  What very particular kind do I have in mind, you ask?  Well, let’s just say it’s the kind of good friend that you drink whisky with for years, with the love of peat helping bind and nurture the ongoing joy of learning about whisky.  It’s the kind who, years later, only months before a trip to Islay you planned with him and another good friend, suddenly announces that he’s simply “over” peated whiskies, as if it’s something to be outgrown, or waited out, like gastroenteritis.  It’s the kind who enjoys the trip to Islay you planned, but doesn’t seem to appreciate the fact that Islay is simply Whisky Heaven.  The Ardbeg Blasda is designed for that kind of friend.  I say that, but I also thought it appropriate while we were there to hit him with the Ardbeg Supernova.  Serves him right.  
     The Ardbeg Blasda is so perfect for a friend like that, because all the way through, it gives you a completely different angle on Islay, but one that is still essentially Islay.  It’s like Islay seen from the wrong end of a telescope (imagine Fred Flintstone looking through a hollowed out log, with a bird on the other end telling him what he’s seeing: the Rubble Telescope, as it were).
     The nose is just really cool: licorice flavored spearmint, a linen dress drying around a fire in the fall, a honeydew melon lightly smoked with applewood. Smell it a moment longer, and you realize you’re smelling the distilled vegetal essence of peat without the smoke.  On the mouth, there’s lemon curd, anise, linseed oil, and faint hints of a very sweet, oily smoke, like one of the last two or three wisps that leech out of the small piece of fatwood you shove in your pocket as you cross the threshold back into the living room, having just destroyed the guest bathroom of your girlfriend’s parents’ house after  partially digesting a dinner of pork medallions and asparagus.  The finish here is the recently shed, but perfectly intact, paper-thin exoskeleton of a typical Ardbeg finish.  How in the world do they do that?!?  Though the finish is on the shorter side, you’ll still be wondering how they do that once it’s gone.
     All of that said, I still kinda prefer making him drink Supernova.  Is that wrong?

Rating: