The Macallan 9 Speymalt Gordon & MacPhail “the wood makes the whisky”

Tasting notes: 
The Macallan 9 Speymalt Gordon & MacPhail “the wood makes the whisky” has a sour first note on the nose, but fortunately I was wearing a surgeon’s mask made from cobwebs spangled with dried gnats. And then: golden citrus sunbeams burst through sawdust and gymnasium clouds, and the nose, which was a strumpet muted by a, er, mute, comes alive. [Stephen: Bill! I hope you meant trumpet, not strumpet! Because I don’t want to imagine it as written.] There’s an overall torus effect, that were it physical, might be like a miniature donut nose ring the surgeon is twiddling with at the YMCA. At any rate, the experience is akin to sliding around in different directions, but not like the fits and starts of an inept skater.

A summer squall without warning; no thunder, no ominous horizon, just a burst of intense changing of states. The taste erupts with a caramel honey slide that Stephen still found muted. (Because of course he did.) It’s fudge for a diabetic who’s lactose intolerant, or maybe just intolerant, or maybe just lactating. It’s an unMacallan Macallan and certainly not an unCola cola—although if I could buy it in six-packs at grocery stores, I’d be a happier man. A surgeon self-anesthetizes, then abruptly disrupts the operation (because disruption is good these days) by shouting “Excelsior!” and eating his etherized patient’s Lindt balls.

The finish ambles through an Assyrian library at the turn of the 20th century. It’s one very long gallery, some marble, some old wood, a lot of limestone, some granite accents, papyrus rolls, parchment, incunabula, palimpsests, and microfiche precursors. Stephen stayed the course and found it…muted. I found it Promethus unbound, bringing lightning bolts to my pallet, wild electricity that I tamed into lighting the night for the reading of James Joyce’s The Dead translated into Assyrian. Pages and pages turned and a reader wonders, “Why?” until the end—and then that end’s ending reverberates, ringing resonantly.

Rating:

 
 
 
–Our thanks to Gordon & MacPhail for the sample!