Nose: Spirity wine – more brandy or even rum than port. Fruit cake, sucrose sweets (like smelling a bag of fruit flavoured candy), Turkish delight, vanilla, malty cereal. With water it gains an odd papery aroma. Palate: Very smooth and sweet arrival. The development brings plums, sultanas and other sweet fruits then cereal and malt syrup flavours. It’s akin to eating a blackcurrant muesli snack bar smothered in butterscotch topping and following that with a handful of barley sugar sweets. With water even more fruits spring out, all berries of some sort, embedded in thick blackberry jam. Finish: Long and slightly spicy, sweet wine in the finish, and a lingering taste of syrup. Not exactly a sherry-bomb, richer and broader than that. More like a syrup bomb. If you like your whisky thick and sweet then this would probably be your thing, but it’s not really mine. I prefer my whisky dry and if I do want something this sweet and mouth-coating I’ll drink a liqueur muscat or Venezuelan rum. It is extremely well crafted, however, with no actual faults at all and I could imagine it would be generally well-received. It’s hard to be objective when something is not to one’s taste. Sampled at a Sydney whisky shop tasting, January 2018. "Good" : 83/100 (3.5 stars)