The Benromach Imperial Proof

Tasting notes:
The Benromach Imperial Proof noses like several decals carefully peeled from a Ferrari Testarossa’s tinted window by the sausage-fingered tuxedo-wearing valet Max at a high-class, cedar-paneled chop shop. Inside are casaba-inflected chiffon flowers sprightly growing on hydrogen peroxide bushes. (You guys got that too, right? Uh, right? John? Stephen? Hello? Hello?) Chipmunk hides ‘yellowed’ with lemon juice, in a ceviche experiment gone terribly, terribly awry. [Stephen: But man, it resulted in some nice leather, even if it is tiny.]

The mouth is a pyroclastic scourge, a cleansing purification you neither knew you wanted nor needed. That is, until a dewy fresh upper, lower, and middle palate burst from the ashes and convinced you that it was the trial by fire that you deserved. It’s fiery, eruptive, disruptive of the status quo of your serenity; it’s a desiccant fused with a petrichor. It’s a wheat endosperm turning away from a life of crime, seeking dissolution and absolution in fusel oil and Glühwein. It’s the VW diesel non-cloud after the software impeded the emissions. It’s burn without brine. To everything, there is a season. Burn, burn, burn.

There is a reason (for a long, long finish). Burn, burn, burn. And although there’s a burn—has that been made clear? —if the ocean was the fire, underneath is an El Nino of sweet citric peel, affecting homeostatic systems in predictably unpredictable ways. Is it hot? Is it sweet? Is it tart? —It seems it can’t be a kaleidoscope of sensations, but it is.

Rating:
On the scale of memorable and searing characters in long-gestating pet projects of true auteurs–
The Benromach Imperial Proof is Imperator Furiosa from Mad Max: Fury Road–She burns, she kills, she protects, she ennobles, and she—at will—kicks ass.