Glenfarclas 17 Year

I've decided that the Glenfarclas family of single malts is rather like my wife's family. You can line her grandmother, mother, sister, and our daughter up and easily see how the younger ones will change with age. This distillery has such a well-defined house style - pronounced sherry influence, but not sherry bombs, marked by nuttiness, dried fruit, and brown sugar notes with the slightest hint of wood smoke somewhere in the background. This, in the middle of the family by age, is more nuanced and smoothed around the edges than, say, the 12 Year, but hasn't quite made it to the complexity and well-aged integration of the 21+ Year expressions. I also find here a bit more citrus than I recall from other bottlings. A very enjoyable dram indeed on a cool fall evening!