The Lagavulin 12 Year Old 2017 Limited Edition

50 ml terracotta soldier spirit safe

Tasting notes:
Ah, this nose!  This nose!  I know Proust talks about tea and madeleines and memory and so forth.  But I’m having a moment like that right now and I won’t need six volumes to capture it.  [Bill: Or literary talent.]  [Stephen: Boom!]  I find that the nose has compressed tons of grains and cereal malts into the greatest breakfast cereal ever.   Scratch that.  It’s the entire Continental breakfast buffet that heaven offers.  Better still, it smells so much like the distillery that I’m brought back there.

The mouth is a cork-screw roller coaster twisting up through the Sound of Islay and back again past Claggain Bay to Port Ellen before shooting through a darkened cask house.   The peat pops and snaps like a pair of car lot windsocks braided into a double helix, and the whole effect is like an EDM party held inside of Milt Jackson’s vibraphone.  Cereals emerge again: Wonder bread toast with burned lingonberry jam, Southern ham biscuits from which my nephew snatched the ham, and communion wafers.

The finish is earthy.  A group of terracotta soldiers holding peat shovels, each bent into postures of effort.  Still, this is a spirit-forward dram.  So much so, I think we can refer to the experience of drinking it as spiritual.
 
 
Rating:
On the scale of true facts about terracotta soldiers–
The—scratch that—you need to see this video about the tarsier! So…
On the scale of true facts about the tarsier
The Lagavulin 12 Year Old 2017 Limited Edition is the fact that the tarsier has the largest eyes relative to head size of any mammal.  And it pretty much looks like me when a glass of this is poured with my reach.
 
 
 
                                                                           –John
 
 
 
–Our thanks to Diageo for the sample!
 
 

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