The Glenfiddich Cask Collection: Select Cask (travel retail)

Tasting notes:
On the nose it’s me standing, against all reason, under a tree in a thunderstorm.  There’s a mixture of earthy soddenness and buzzing electricity.  The rain thwaps on my maroon poncho until it is soaked through.  I smell soft bananas hollowed out and filled with fruit-houka smoke and ambrosia.  A light grapeyness hangs in the air, and creamy clouds as if from evaporated custard billow up from below.

The mouth strikes me first of all with its lightness and delicacy.  How can it achieve such sparkles and spangles?  Then spices emerge: pepper thistles, honey suckle pollinated by clove-bees, and turmeric rhizomes simmered in rose water.  My tongue eagerly greats the still-warm sugar cane grilled over palm wood flames that has been scraped out with a hand rake.

Wow, this finish lasts as long as a nap in the private sleeper car on a train that embarks from the American Rockies and ends in the Caribbean!  The forbidden dance between sweet and spicy continues:  A paprika chess piece approaches and a butterscotch Easter bunny retreats; the Marzipan queen captures a Malabar pepper rook.  I offer to man the chess clock so that I can enjoy this battle more closely.
 
 
Rating:
On the scale of popular scales for representing likelihoods–
 The Glenfiddich Cask Collection: Select Cask is the likelihood of being struck by lightning— More widely distributed than the likelihood of being eaten by a shark, and far more democratic than the likelihood of dying in a plane crash, this is the drink-anywhere dram for the everyman or woman.
 
 
 
                                                                 –John