Gordon and MacPhail, Elgin, Shop Tasting, 4th May 2024, whisky #5 Nose: Gentle mature oak, honey and beeswax, sugar-coated cereal flakes, frangipani, mango, ripe rockmelon. It’s like the aroma of a bowl of fresh flowers and tropical fruit standing on an old pine dresser, polished for decades with beeswax and standing in a cheerful sunny room with the windows open and a warm summer breeze drifting through. Adding a little water develops golden syrup, dried figs and slightly warmed almonds. Palate: The arrival is huge, with soft old tannins and lignin that envelop like an angora blanket. Lightly toasted muesli with tropical fruit and honey-sweetened yoghurt. The development turns maltier and more robust with dried fruits, leather, golden syrup and treacle coming forward, and this in turn passes to a milk chocolate, chewing tobacco and nut combination. The progression is slow, complex and defined. The texture is like thinned honey and towards the end a faint ashy (barrel char?) note emerges. Adding water makes the nutty and dark fruit sherry cask contribution more obvious. Finish: Medium/Long. Picking up from the palate the whisky continues to develop into the aftertaste becoming more drying and firm, with earthy tobacco and a hint of maritime brine in the finale. This was a very fine whisky and I summed up the tasting notes in my journal with two words: absolutely exquisite. It was distilled in September 1991 and filled into a refill sherry butt (distillery cask #15386) where it resided for 30 years before being emptied in December 2021 to produce 488 bottles at 55.7% abv. That’s a pretty amazing act when you consider how little loss there was to the angels over the course of three decades! Issued as part of Gordon & MacPhail’s Connoisseur Cask Strength range, this is a great whisky that is still available from some retail outlets. The price is considerable, and a bit too much for my budget nowadays, but the whisky is genuinely worth it. “Excellent” : 89/100 (4.75 stars)