The Mannochmore 25 Year Old 2016 Limited Edition

Tasting notes:
The Mannochmore 25 Year Old Diageo release opens with cowled monks milling about, making glühwein to drink at a Macklemore concert. They’ve been eating mollusks, watching Marvel movies, and muttering about mad Manicheans on the Isle of Man. It’s a benevolent nose; a pre-Greenhouse Gas environment in which the sun was never a problem. We found butterscotch candy, poached eggs, unsweetened custard, Hollandaise sauce-drenched oven mitts and sandpaper. Stephen, to the astonishment of all, found oysters in blueberry sauce.

The mouth is soft and tender, sweet and comely. It winks alluringly at you from across the room, but not in a way that feels ironic or cheap. The flavors—orange custard ice cream with toffee crumbles and butterscotch sauce—run together beautifully, like the normally-distinct faces on Mount Rushmore blend into each other for an acid-tripping hippie from the Sixties. It tastes as if I’ve been holding it in my hand for an hour, warming it by the power of my thought, culminating with it approaching Nirvana without me. I’m sad for myself, but happy for it.

The finish fires the sides of my mouth, like wilderness experts who light controlled fires to prevent The Big One. With water, it becomes creamy and transgressive, like holding a Bar Mitzvah at a Gentlemen’s Club during Dollar Lap Dance Sunday Afternoon. It cries out for dark chocolate, and asserts its essential univocality of nose/mouth/finish. Extraordinary.
 
 
Rating:
On the scale of events that seem discrete in time, but are actually continuous–
The Mannochmore 25 Year Old 2016 Limited Edition is Sunrise/Sunset–My sunrise is someone else’s sunset—weird!—and although for me the sunrise is over in about 20 minutes, it’s someone else’s sunrise a bit further west. The sun is continually rising as the world turns, and I’m continually dreaming of discreetly drinking Stephen and John’s share of the Mannochmore 25yo sample we received. Alas, they’re wise to my tricks, and I’m a silly rabbit.
 
 
 
 
                                                                              –Bill
 
 
 
 
–Our thanks to Diageo for the sample!