The Lagavulin 12 Year Old 2019 Special Release

Tasting notes:
This Islay gem has a comely nose. One might even say pulchritudinous, but that is a word that sounds so different from what it means that I abjure its use. Abjure, though! What a word that one is!

You want me to talk about the whisky, right? Okay, well on the nose it totally has the kiln-dried birch wood for a king’s funeral pyre going for it. But there’s Smarties, fruit candy with the color and opacity of sea glass, and candied white asparagus. This is going to be the strangest Salade Niçoise EVER!!!

The mouth is like a Sterno campfire gel made for tweenage girls by Bath and Body Works. Nitrous afterburners on a souped-up, Mad Max muscle car. We are rolling now! Singed orchid petals, clear acrylic rain jackets for jumbo shrimp, and a toner cartridge warming a cool new ream of paper.

The finish is long, like the echo of a gunshot in a crevasse. Take heart pine kindling to start a fire, and then make smoky sacrifice to a diffident god. Water smooths, but heightens the integrity. It’s like a lumberjack artist who turns a larch log into a leopard on a lark. It became quite elegant, like the complicated action hero who walks away without a glance as the building he rigged with explosives turns into a ball of flame.

   

Rating:
On the scale of Salade Niçoise traditionalists–

The Lagavulin 12 Year Old 2019 Special Release is Renée Graglia–Abjuring the use of boiled vegetables of any kind that Auguste Escoffier favored a century earlier, she centers her salad on tomatoes, anchovies, and olive oil.  From such simplicity greatness emerges, and so it is with the Lagavulin 12 Year Old 2019 Special Release.

   

   

                                                   —John

   

   

–Our thanks to Diageo for the sample!