Linkwood 11 Year Old 2006 - Single Cask - Master of Malt (Cadenheads?)

This is the Linkwood reviewed by @RianC in January bottled by Master of Malt. It's almost certainly the highly rated Cadenhead Linkwood talked about on Connosr at the end of last year. All the specifics for this MoM bottling (month and year of distillation and bottling, abv etc) are exactly the same as for the Cadenhead bottle.

This is my first Linkwood, it's nothing like I imagined it to be. I'd read the blurb on the back of the Johnnie Walker Green label about Talisker and Caol Ila providing the power and Linkwood providing the balance. I imagined it to be a fairly vanilla 'Speyside by numbers' malt.

I was wrong.

Colour - Lighter than light. When one of my daughter's saw me sipping this she made a comment that she didn't realise you could get clear whisky. It's not clear. But it's like a very light chardonnay.

Nose - childrens cereal (sugar puffs) , anti-septic (tcp), brown sugar, powdered milk.

Palate - mouthfeel is oily, viscous and mouth- coating. Without water the palate is hot and you can't make much out other than a generalised sweetness. With water (It takes a LOT of water ) -pineapple, a little white wine vinegar, cough sweets, more cereal but less sweet on the palate (weetabix), a nice grain note.

Finish- looooong, aniseed and liquorice, my favourite sweet from my childhood (kop kops) which are kind of a liquoricey boiled sweet, it eventually goes dry and bitter

How to describe this whisky? It's a bit of an enigma. I've had the bottle open 6 months and I still have about half left. It's the sort of whisky you have to be in the right mood for. It probably doesn't help that the bottle is so high I have to keep it on a shelf in the garage as it's too high to claim a spot on my whisky shelf in the kitchen cupboard!

So how to describe it? When I took my first sip I immediately thought of Ardbeg Corryvrecken? Why? Well it tastes nothing like Corryvrecken. But it has the same unapologetic spirit driven power that the Corryvrecken has. Just without the peat and such. It's like the yin to the Ardbeg's yang.

This is the great thing about single cask bottlings. You get mad whiskies like this!