Last week we hosted the eighth Tasting Facile, the party we organize every year in Milan under the pretext of tasting whisky from the past (recent or remote), trying to open important bottles to share them with friends and whisky lovers. Almost every year we managed to put into the line up a Macallan bottled in the 80s, and this time we did it too: Macallan 10 years old, imported by Armando Giovinetti at the beginning of the decade of disco, paninari and pentapartito.
N: this is an incredible nose: sometimes you forget the olfactory show, and you say “ah, always the same Macallan: good, uh, but they taste all the same…”. Well, we’d be more than happy to only have whiskies that taste like that. The fruity component, which hits you hard right from the start, is absolutely explosive: strawberries, raspberries, cherries, blackberries, blackcurrants, blueberries… Fresh tamarind. Excellent. Coffee, our beloved notes from an old manuscript library, from a National Library consultation room; chocolate. Warm wood. Ah, and how did we not say “tobacco”? Unreliable people, we are.
P: ah, but it is non-alcoholic! But be careful, even if it has lost a few degrees the body holds still, it has not floured. It is more ‘sticky’ than the nose, with sticky and caramelized citrus fruits: bitter orange, chinotto (a lot of chinotto). Alkekengi, to sum up something bitter and sour at the same time. Coffee powder, a sense of finished cappuccino; coffee praline. Excellent. It remains, to accompany the finale, a sense of damp earth, or damp dried fruit… Attention: notes of myrtle!, very evident. Striking: during the Easy Tasting Giacomo was quoting the Ricola with red fruits, to make the idea of a juicy and balsamic fruit, but the myrtle wins.
F: long, persistent, tends to close a bit on the dry side – more walnuts and tamarind and blueberry juice; roasted wood and coffee, again. Gunpowder?
We enjoyed drinking it during the tasting, but maybe we didn’t realize how much grace we had in front of us. It really is a spectacular whisky, we can’t hide: complex and drinkable, with a sherried old-school profile (where do we find such a style today?) with fruity, balsamic flames and an impressive depth. Ah, the good old days… 91/100.
Recommended soundtrack: Tom Waits – Earth died screaming.
