Glenfarclas 15 Year Old

This winter I made my first Christmas cake. I followed a Nigel Slater recipe, and was wowed by the smell of it cooking in the oven. It's better than anything else I've ever baked - all those flavours and ingredients mixing together, and the aromas just fill the house. It smells better than bread cooking.

Now, the Glenfarclas 15 - my first from that distillery - smells and tastes absolutely like Christmas cake. To be sure, I wafted it under my girlfriend’s nose (I think she's got a better sense of smell than me) and she’s agrees, though is insistent that it’s with the icing on top). There's the sweetness, the dried fruits.

When you taste it there are immediately plenty of dried fruits again, as well as sherry; the peat isn’t that prominent, but is certainly discernible. It has a real weight in the mouth, too, treacly and oily, and it just hangs on your taste-buds for quite some time while you dream of a warm fire and distant, rolling landscapes. At first glance, it's delicious.

I've come back to this a couple of times, after spending some time with Islay malts, and for some reason I can never quite get into it in the same way as those first couple of glasses. I don't know what that is. Perhaps because it's no longer Christmas...

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