Glen Garioch 1971 Samaroli 59.6%

A legendary bottle. Like with Brora, those peated years seemed to have brought magical depths and dimensions on scales we now see as unimaginable today. Here an astounding landscape unfolds from the glass, salty parma ham, thickly umami but dry with charcoal ash. Soot blackened glass on cracking cedar tables upon which tobacco and tree resins seem to have been sorted on alternative days. Hung game. The sherry comes in a worn leather boots, stained with oily black mud and branch sap but unveiling cough syrup and blackberry and cherry paste. Black olives, dried persimmon and an overload of petrichor. The peat arrives in sledgehammer blows, monstrous and roaring, deeply deeply phenolic. Monochrome tarry, earthy, dry and petrochemical, but no seaside here of course – a different take on this wonderful old style peat than compared to Islay, but no less phenomenal. Grimy granite underfoot, reconstituting into bitter quinine and medicine. A colossus with few equals. 95 pts