The Glenfarclas 15

Tasting notes: 
     Smoother and agey-er than the three that have preceded it, like Smokey Robinson walking into a bar right after Jay-Z, Adam Levine, and Lorde. The nose packs notes of pepper encrusted pine log resting upon a bed of burning peaches. Work on it longer, and one gets star fruit, in the hands of a star-nosed mole, in the lap of Starr Jones, getting ready for American Idol. There’s also a musky, slightly seaborne note lurking just under the surface, as if Kim Kardashian prepared for a fishing trip by ordering the very best bucket of bait purchasable (the “bucket” was a sterilized and gilded Chinese food box). Or perhaps it’s the note of a mole chancing upon some mole (many, many, many moles worth, in fact) left on a paper plate left on a country club golf course. To say it’s reflexive would be an understatement.
     The mouth is lovely: big and balanced with spice but not so much fire. The embers here glow red, but there are no flames. Notes of orange lacquer handcrafted by Slovenian monks who emigrated to Cappadocia, along with a monk to be named later. And a case of great beer. It’s full and round without coming off as too necessarily creamy. [John: So it’s just slightly contingently creamy?]
     The finish is muted, like a coronet played in a cedar lined closet chock full of wooly suits. Bill dissents on that last description: “No, it’s still quite powerful.” “And long,” John adds. The finish is closely linked to the mouth, like twins who finish each other’s sentences. Give the finish some time on the palate, and you’ll see that Bill is right: it’s a powerful finish. Not unlike trying to dissolve a steak in a glass of Coca-Cola. [Bill: Are you likening my tongue to a steak? Again?!?] After a quick survey of the other possible contenders, Bill deems this the quintessential micro-glorping* dram. 
    
    
*-Micro-glorping is a conservation technique Bill pioneered that involves taking minute amounts of whisky into one’s mouth at a time in order to extend the savoring of a dram (“glorp” being a slug, a gulp’s worth; a micro-glorp being a tiny, tiny fraction of that amount, but not as little as a nanoglorp, which are glorps so infinitely small that it would take a Zenonic infinity to complete the dram).