The Single Cask Nation Westland 3 Year Old 2012 (1st Fill Bourbon Barrel)

Tasting notes: 
The Single Cask Nation Westland 1st Fill Bourbon Barrel 2012 beguiles my senses with its gorgeous, rich, Ben and Jerry’s Orange Sunshine Sherbet Dreamsicle (circa 1967) nose. Wow! Britt Ekland and I are watching a Swedish sunset in January, 1967, while our servants—this is a fantasy, okay?—are twirling around bundles of groomsmen’s boutonnières in an elegant, refined pattern because they are the expressive love-children of Sufi dervishes and Hula dancers.

The mouth explodes with organic candied lake trout leather slippers—wait, slippers for lake trout? No! Slippers from lake trout! Perhaps the slippers should be put in the stockings of naughty children? Or maybe an ironic gift, along with a never-smoked-in crushed velvet smoking jacket adorned with fobs of honeycombs, both real and the Post cereal? (The gifts are to your great-uncle who was devastated by the  news that Playboy is about to cease print production.) But these impulses, though true to your self, are wrong. The slippers are for royalty: Queen bees, Queen Latifah, and Queen Beyoncé. It’s a good thing the slippers come in all sizes. John noted that it was a simple mouth, a clownfish mouth, because these are the sorts of things John says when he’s dumbstruck and gobsmacked.

The finish is rich without being melty…like an aged Edam cheese that oozes umami similar to the way that Britt Ekland (circa 1967) used to ooze wholesome sex appeal. There are hordes of marauding sweet, sweet notes that broke free of a Bach cantata, seeking to cloy my tongue! But my tongue is in cryogenic sleep next to Ted Williams’ head in Arizona. It’s as if the incomparable Georgie Bell, though she has nothing whatsoever to do with Westland, was let loose in a parfumerie’s underground research lab in Grasse, takes those errant notes and masterfully—mistressfully?—blends them into a medieval tapestry rife with unicorns, saints, and impishly-placed Pixar Easter eggs.

 
 
Rating:

  
 
 
–Our thanks to Single Cask Nation for the sample!