The Caol Ila Stitchell Reserve 2013 Limited Edition

Tasting notes:
One of these things is not like the other.  Or so I’ve heard it said.   And surely here we have the black sheep, the outlier, the red-headed step child.  Surely this is the Rudy of Diageo special releases. Undersized, shabby on the bench press, and no one’s idea of fleet of foot.  But all effort and heart.  Get him on the field, coach!  He’s ready to play. 
     But wait a minute.  This is one can really run with the big dogs.  It doesn’t suffer from comparison.  On the contrary, it is enhanced by it.  Has there ever been a no age statement whisky that holds up as well as this one does in such a pantheonic lineup?  Initial notes of sterno fuel under the minestrone served at your favorite uncle’s fourth wedding.  The mutton chops are exceptional—and I mean those on his face and those now on our plates.  It’s already the third course of the meal, and I note the irony that two more courses await.  Poor Emily, Emily the fourth, she is, she is.  Will she last to the slicing of the cake?
     The mouth is has hints of grapefruit creamsicles, more stick than sicle at this point.  Then chocolate cardamom shell, striated with caramel.  Jellyfish stuffed into the tailpipe of a Stutz Bearcat by the disaffected sons of privilege in Malibu, whose parents will claim “affluenza” and have the charges vacated.  However, before the arrest pictures were expunged from the police computer server, they were leaked in the application that Colin submitted for the casting call for “The Real Shitbirds of Malibu,” for which Colin thought—rightly, oh how very rightly—that he was the perfect fit.
     On the finish it’s medicinal, like good medicine.  Or better to say, it’s like physical therapy: A licorice tongue strigil works over me with the persistence of a desktop Zen garden gardener who takes the whole thing much too seriously.  Round and oily goodness.  An ample bosomed classical Madonna meets her modern day namesake after she steps out of a post-concert shower in Barcelona.  Peppery on the open, but super smooth—a black pepper compote.  Perhaps even a peppermint cayenne hybrid, which is to say, a wet meerkat.