The Glenmorangie Duthac

Tasting notes:
With a name like Duthac, I think to myself, this review is going to write itself.  I’ll take “the sound of Satan spitting” for $200, Alex.  But then I learned that it’s the name of a saint of great renown.  Famously, King James IV made annual, weeks-long pilgrimages for 20 years to his shrine.  Dang it! I think to myself; I’m going to have to be serious with this one.

Canadian bacon wrapped around thick, pink clots of goat-chewed bubble gum.  Halloumi cheese (Halloumi?  She hardly knew me!) dusted with cocoa powder, drizzled with walnut oil, and then placed in a Panini press.  Plum sake.  Pencil eraser bits peppering a high school chemistry answer sheet for a test that is not going well, not going well at all.

The mouth has some classic Glenmorangie fusion of opposites, perhaps from the use of ex-bourbon and PX sherry casks.  Think “yin and yang” except that the person in your head has a curious speech impediment and says what sounds like “thin and tang.”  Thin, quick-moving, spry; spicy heat chases it along the tongue like the guy in the office who likes giving hugs.  Then tang, like a catcher’s mitt soaked in a bath of sherry to break it in.  Or that same mitt used to represent the size of a steak ordered on a business trip.  Beef jelly, perfume, Khartoum, smoke plume, Judy Blume.

The finish has about it, initially, flatness, like Spartan prose, percale sheets, and soufflé inadvisably made for your nephew’s sixth birthday (there was a Jurassic Park theme).  But it is enduring and persists like a raisin clinging to your molars.  The dissipation of the finish comes long after my own.  It’s like a dust devil of sparrow feathers and cottonwood leaves.  Delicate, hypnotic, and suggestive.  Plums, again, but this time juiced and then boiled down to the thickness of balsamic vinegar.