Tasted during the Blind Tasting Consortium’s 18th session on 5-2-22, in which Damian – @newdramrising picked the bottles.
Appearance
A touch lighter than mid gold in colour, with a lovely thick swirl line and thick syrupy legs.
Nose
Lots of wood shavings here, balsa wood, followed by cereals and grains, there’s also a dustiness too. An aroma of paper comes through, and there are fruits in here, but they are rather shy.. It is slowly becoming more tropical fruit like, with a touch of evergreen boughs, straw, and lychees, (stolen from @thedramble) 😁
Palate
Thin-ish mouthfeel, but nice and warming. Bitter lemon, grapefruit, lemon rind, milky coffee, apricots, guava, there are deeper fruits here, but again they seem a little shy at the moment.
Finish
A real mix of sweetness and bitterness for me. Icing sugar and blackcurrant jam, char, royal icing, and I’m sure the faintest red berries, like new make red berry flavours, and it becomes quite spicy too, plenty of cinnamon, with cumin.
My thoughts
After finding out what this dram was i understood why the mouthfeel was so thin and watery, which was a shame. Finding out it was 21 years old made me feel a little sad to be honest, so much potential reduced to 40% ABV, but it is what it is. I gave this a 3 out of 5 in the end, i enjoyed the aromas and flavours, and feel that with more time it would offer more, but the low ABV and mouthfeel definitely affected my score.
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