Chivas Regal Extra Blended Scotch Whisky

Tasting notes:
I’ve been…drinking? Suddenly, I’m on an old carousel with wooden horses wiped down with a mixture of Lemon Pledge™ and almond extract. There are Ace bandages (I think) wrapped around the Johnson & Johnson Band Aids™ covering my eyes. What? Oh, I guess I’d passed out on a maglev bullet train and a kindly stranger was waving a glass of Chivas Extra under my nose to wake me up out of a fitful fugue state. I held his hand tight, keeping the glass under my nose, hoovering up chestnuts roasting over a closed fire in the exhaust pipe of a cast-iron stove. LET GO OF MY HAND! I shout, confusedly, given that I am holding his hand. But I didn’t want to lose track of the very faintest tinge of Oloroso sherry, entirely funk-free. No bewigged Parlimentarians were in the compartment with me, but I was imagining P-Funk without the funk, y’know? Apples coated in butterscotch? Butter sliders designed for toast? Yes, and yes.

The stranger’s kindliness turned to fear, if not active disdain. The stranger—was it Leonardo DiCaprio? Brad Pitt?—left me the glass, murmured a brief goodbye, and left the compartment. I drank. My first thought was that I would proudly serve this dram to anyone’s grandfather! My second thought was that the high sweetness from the grain mitigated, nay, ameliorated the funk, while somehow, the marshmallowy taste I love from grains was precisely resected. Perhaps a food scientist could explain it: The funk and marshmallow canceled each other out, as surely as debts and assets do for each other. My third thought, I shall keep to myself. My fourth thought was that the Ordinary had been resected from the Extraordinary, leaving exactly the Extra. “You’re so Extra,” intoned a goth young woman in my compartment, not looking up from her phone, evidently reading my mind.

The finish leaves a little wax on the back of my palate, and persimmon-flavored Oreos™ as well: a little cream, a little tang. They know what they’re doing at Chivas! This is what we thought it was! It was that it was! It is that it is! (Plus, always, that little bit Extra.) There’s the faintest enticing hint of asperity or acerbity hiding deep within, evoking a subtle, clandestine superhero: AcerboWoman. She’s a snide gal who hides behind ferns in evil geniuses’ lairs and makes unflattering, deprecatory–almost catty–remarks that no one hears, but that somehow depress all the henchmen and minions until no one does their job effectively. And then, more butterscotch.

   

Rating:
On the scale of superpowers that I wish I had–

The Chivas Regal Extra Blended Scotch Whisky is the ability to suddenly become frictionless at will, and thus slide into or out of situations, sometimes as gracefully as an Olympic-gold skater, other times as awkwardly as a yak strapped into roller skates and pushed down Lombard Street in San Francisco–Nevertheless, I could slide, glide, and collide with impunity, smoothly moving like nobody’s business but my own.

   

   

                                                                                      —Bill

   

   

–Our thanks to Chivas Regal for the sample!