The Singleton of Glen Ord 14 Year 2018 Special Release

Tasting notes:
The nose of the The Singleton of Glen Ord 14 opens with beautiful pine needles, cleansed in white wine vinegar, ensheathed in marshmallow scabbards. It’s fruity, and we also found birchbark tannins and amber lacquer—but not Amber Lacquer, the infamous exotic dancer/spy responsible for the collapse of the Weimar Republic. There’s a lovely Christmas diorama, including miniature white chocolate snowmen with beady cinnamon raisins for eyes, and a gingerbread man living in his gingerbread house, which is roofed over with butterscotch shingles and red, green, and white gum drops.

The mouth brings Red Hots®, more cinnamon spice, more ginger, and freeze-dried molasses reconstituted in Madagascar vanilla. It’s smooth, but has a bite, like getting one of those thousand-pin-prick-microneedle face rollers zipping up and down on my tongue. There are gingerbread Rottweilers, more lacquer, more amber, and just generally more, more, more! (It’s a plutocratic nirvana!)

The finish brings yet more molasses with dried cherries in 81% cacao chocolate. It’s like scrapings of Sherry that evaporated out of the glass, leaving behind only its innermost essence. It’s part and parcel of the mouth, an exuberant upstreaming—while going down—of the all the main notes, going back and forth like a Bach fugue played expertly by Bachman-Turner Overdrive. The latter, BTO expertly playing Bach, being fairly implausible, yet not dissimilar to the way that the The Singleton of Glen Ord 14 manages to pull off unforeseen surprises. I mean, Glen Ord? Glen Ord!

   

Rating:
On the scale of  things that go best in the wintertime–

The The Singleton of Glen Ord is eating chestnuts that were roasted over an open fire while snowboarding, just before faceplanting into a Bûche de Noël. Yum! Whee! Yikes! Yum! Lather, rinse, drink, repeat.

   

   

                                                   —Bill

   

   

–Our thanks to Diageo for the sample!