The Glencadam 15

Tasting notes:
Butterscotch.  Fruits.  Butterscotch dipped in fruit.  Sweet smelling eraser fragments on an exam you’d soon fail.  Pencil lead as well, pressed hard but with near-certain futility into a blue book.  Pudding prepared as a reward for doing well on the exam, but eaten anyway and without a shred of guilt.
     The mouth takes the hesitant butterscotch and makes it dance on the tongue.  It’s like Yosemite Sam has fired his six-shooters at the feet of the candies, hollerin’ at ‘em to dance! dance!  Now there’s loads of lemon—candied lemon, jellied lemon, pickled lemons, lemon vagabonds—on the back of the mouth.  I wish I could squeeze this taste onto every kind of fish I eat until I die.  Consider the most buttery lemon poundcake, dripping in moisture from its gluey brine.  If a hitchhiker tasted like this, you’d lean over to open the glove compartment in the hope that your tongue might, might, might find a bit of exposed forearm.  All accidentally, of course.  Oh, this is your destination?  So quickly?  Okay, then, here you go.  Have a great night!
     The finish reminds me of a Christmas film I watched as a child on a super-8 projector.  The host’s Christmas Eve tradition was to watch the film through, in almost reverent anticipation, until the end when Santa was shown coming down the chimney and putting gifts into the stockings.  At the end of the film, the father would rewind it with the film passing over the lens to see the whole thing backwards and really fast.  Suddenly, the dull film became interesting and almost enthralling.  So it is with the Glencadam.  On the finish there’s the thrilling reassertion of sour lemons, sweet fruit, creamy butterscotch, bitter pencil lead, and strangely salty forearm all turned together like clothes in a drier, or a kaleidoscope turned quickly by a bored child, or the years of your life as you consider them from the ledge of a moral precipice.   

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