Hyperion! Oh most perfect and tallest and best, with allowances made for age and time and weight and precedence but still best and far and away. Drinking this after a bunch of other great whiskeys is like spending all day listening to great rolling stones songs and then getting high and putting on "Exile on Main Street" with your best friend. It is everything, it is total, it is allatonce. Listing the words Peat, Smoke, Sugar, Wood, Salt, Heat does not begin to describe, but is all we (both of us loquacious to a fault) could manage while tasting. The small glass is passed reverently back and forth where everything else is tasted demurely in separate cups. Exclamations are halted in mid utterance by gasps and sighs.
I will describe my experience.
The nose is a cigar, simultaneously lit, unlit, in your mouth, and across the room. There are acres of spice-fields and a neighboring peat-bog, and no human cigar has ever actually smelled like this, but the principle of this whiskey is impossible simultaneity, so maybe an array of perfect cigars in combination could smell this way. Drinking the liquid (one shudders to remember it) brings into your mouth a shooter marble-sized globe of smoke, weightless and perfectly spherical that hits your tongue and bursts, surging everywhere at once with every possible flavor (and some less possible), coating teeth and tongue and overwhelming the senses. The finish is eternal and leaves your saliva salty and sweet.
It is sublime, not because it is so delicious (though it is soooo delicious), but because of its power to overwhelm. The senses, tuned and pointed to tasting, the mind awaiting instruction, expecting pleasure, all are swamped by the tidal wave 1/4 oz sip; there is too much to know, the brain rebels, the mind founders. It is the world, distilled, and there is no worry great enough to match its calming blitz. I immediately thought of rainbows, because they are made of light and they are familiar, and yet they are bizarre and cosmic and elemental, and because they represent the principle of the limitation of the senses. We look at a rainbow and see colors. If we have good eyes and look more closely we see some gradations at the edges of other colors. We will never be spectrometers, however and there is a huge swath of the spectrum that is invisible to the eye. The rainbow is trite and pleasant as a reminder of what we can see (pretty colors) but numinous and cthonic as a reminder of what we can't. This is this whiskey in the mouth, showing us the limits of our tasting apparatus and suggesting another invisible, un-tasteable world immediately adjacent in space-time.
And it is melancholy, because how will you taste it again? Where will we find it, how could we afford it? And secretly, you suspect yourself. You say, "was this as good as thought or was I just drunk and in great company?" You suspect that the great horror of returning to it to find it lacking will occur. The permanence of whiskey (in contrast to the evanescence of wine) is a great danger in the sense, because the taster returns months later, years later, a changed person, and maybe that cherished dram is no longer so revelatory. Except that I am sure this one will be, if I am so lucky to ever see it again.
If I have any authority as a drinks person, it is because I have tasted this.
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