The Glenallachie 12 Year Old

Tasting notes:
The GlenAllachie 12 noses like fruit juice. Like a fruit cocktail. Like a steampunk machine made by a fruit dessicator who used dried fruits as cogs. Like a howling pack of (friendly?) fruit wolves that surround you and are inviting you into their pack. At first, we thought it was a layered-fruit pastry, as if some orthogonal-to-the-rest-of-us genius French-trained baker (Giselle?) pounded auspicious dates, vitiated plums, umbrous oranges, Asian pears, ebullient mangoes, tart kiwis, and mere whortleberries into thin sheets, dusted them with flour, slathered them in acidulous, cultured butter and marmalade, layered the ball-peened lamina, and rolled them into fruit croissants: Fruissants™, most puissant! There is also a dusting, like powdered sugar, of cardboard particles. Finally, Stephen got a Creamsicle with a core of green peppers (grilled? roasted? raw?) swaddled between the white and orange layers, because of course he did.

The mouth brings more fruit! It’s fruitastic! A hammered tin cup—“hammered” with a hammer, John, not hammered by alcohol—filled with, you guessed it, more fruit and topped with sliced ripe bananas. There are cloistered fruit clusters closeted closely together. The fruit melts in your mouth, as if some orthogonal-to-the-rest-of-us genius Swiss-trained chocolatier (René?) alchemically gave fruit the physical properties of chocolate.

The finish invokes the metallic tang, briefly, then it reverberates into the impressions left in the listener’s mind after the choir stops singing and the echoes have slowly diminished into memory. What’s left? Fruit! Fruit compote! Stewed fruit! And again, a soupçon of green pepper fruit soup, firing along the tongue when long gone from the rest of the mouth.

   

Rating:
On the scale of smartphone apps–

The GlenAllachie 12 Year Old is Fruit Ninja–Slicing and dicing fruit with a katana for the win: Fruit! Ninja!

   

   

                                                                                      —Bill

   

   

–Our thanks to ImpEx Beverages for the sample!