This scotch puzzles me a little bit. I smell a lot of fresh saplings, snapped in half, along with some Riesling, and gravel. To describe it in the best light, it's a vineyard after a fitful spring rain. But it's a hard scent to pull out of the glass, and at times manifests as a watery, faintly sweet echo of its best self. Then there's a wonderful harmony of flavors of ripe orchard fruit, tannic wood, and toasted malt. It's not overly sweet, which is an achievement in a wine-finished whisky. If anything, it hews a little bit too far on the side of bitterness, and it finishes like a dry white wine. Unlike the spectacular BenRiach 18 Albariza, I'm pretty sure this expression is not peated at all. Given how well BenRiach's distillate takes to some moderate peating, I suspect it would have been to this expression's benefit to up the smoke level a little. At or around a pricey $100 a bottle, I wouldn't classify this as a must-have scotch.