The Bowmore 10 Year Old Limited Edition Inspired by the Devil’s Casks (travel retail release)

Tasting notes:
The Bowmore 10 Year Old Limited Edition inspired by the Devil’s Casks series, opens sweetly, with sherry and red wine notes…that quickly turn to rapidly-spinning bicycle inner-tubes, festooned with mirrors and many-colored LED lights, disco-ball illuminating a Walpurgisnacht Sherry Madness festival. (The tubes were blown out by Greg LeMond after spite-riding in his frustration over the state of the sport.) Smoke hate-hugs sherry; there’s love and distrust, but mostly alliance against the doldrums. There are little bits of clay agglutinated with pine resin, too, sprinkled with a sweet port.

The mouth is smooth, velvety, and rich, like a fop’s smoking jacket, circa 1957. Here, the competing flavors have transformed the Shakespearean Beast With Two Backs into one beast with a long and twisted spine. There are stewed apples in a maple pot in a friendly rose garden in which a Yule log has been burning since late July.

The finish starts with a Jolly Rancher pulled through a hookah. The peat, the salt, and the wine each assert a dissonant aspect of themselves, yet merge, forming a vision, if not a unity, like the instruments in Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor. There’s almost an armagnac hiding behind a tapestry woven from the Bowmore smoke, the wine, and the sherry. They persist in being together while remaining distinct, like a polyamorous throuple.

  

Rating:
On the scale of three things that are also one–

The Bowmore 10 Year Old, Limited Edition, Travel Release, inspired by the Devil’s Cask, is the Fodder, the Sun, and the Wholly Ghosted Guy–It’s an odd trinity, but they have an affinity for divinity, and just like the Bowmore 10, LE, TR, ibtDC, they somehow work together beautifully.

   

   

                                                                            —Bill