Fruit forward on the nose with sweet ripened orchard fruits intermingled with the clean grassy cereal notes of a well made irish. A touch of heat at the end reminds you this is cask strength. Its a beautiful nose - albeit slighly inferior in complexity to the blue spot. Baking spice, cinnamon and ripe bananas explode on fist sip, its got a bite. This isnt a dessert wine. Theres almost too much going on all at once, which is interesting and confusing at the same time. The finish is moderately long, with the baking spices and plum lingering in the background. Ive now had all the spots with the exception of the wine finished greens. Id rate them roughly as follows: blue>gold>red >yellow and then green without accounting for value. If you add value back in yellow rises above red. Id been lucky enough to find a blue very early in its run but had to wait for almost 3 yrs for a second and third. The gold spot was nearly impossible to find and became a sort of white whale for my mates and me until we finally located one. I can see what the hype was about, but to me the blue edges it out. I love how tighyly coiled and restrained the blue is. They both have similar notes and flavors but gold mashes the keys all at once and holds them down until you drown in them. Blue is like a jazz orchestra that takes a while to get going but when all the notes come into harminy it produces something greater than the sum of the parts. Glad i tried this and id likely get another for msrp.