pop & pour

This may be the first time I’ve posted three days in a row since this blog’s inauguration.  I promise you that there will be a wine review coming up soon — I’m actually going to be working on it once I finish this — but first the monolith that is Advent rolls on and there are whisky duties to attend to.  The Speyside streak in the KWM Whisky Advent calendar ends at two:  tonight’s bottle is a single malt scotch from the Lowlands in southeast Scotland.  I’m going to give KWM the benefit of the doubt and assume that they loaded up the Auchentoshan 3 Wood on Day 3 of Advent because it would karmically fit nowhere else.

Day 3: triple distilled, triple wood. Fore!

The 3 Wood is so named because it was aged in three different types of wooden barrels before bottling:  first old Bourbon casks, then Oloroso Sherry casks and then finally Pedro Ximenez Sherry casks.  It was also triple distilled, a rarity nowadays for whisky and a sort of superfluous additional 3 to add to the pile.  The price point is near-identical to the first two bottles in this series at $76.  The wood triumverate shows up on both the colour (way darker and more orange-hued than the past two scotches) and the flavour profile of the whisky, all coffee grounds and popcorn kernels and hickory on the nose, blooming into chocolate orange and saltwater taffy on the palate, with a slightly bitter-tinged sweet yet medicinal finish, sort of like Neo Citran.  It’s a little rougher around the edges than the breezier, smoother Speysides of Days 1 and 2, and would probably rank the lowest of the three so far, but it would still be ideal for sitting in a big leather armchair and watching golf.