It's barrels like this that make me so happy to be part of what the K&L Spirits Department does. But this barrel also represents one of the strangest dichotomies of this industry. We've always relied on our bottling partners to source great barrels and sell them at incredible prices. In fact, just a couple of decades ago, these bottlers were the only place you could get single casks at cask strength. Over the years, the brands themselves have taken such insane price increases that the independents found room to move up their prices, but when things got tough the brands are stuck. Our bottlers, however, don’t have such concerns and we've been able to negotiate incredible prices on some extremely special single casks during these unprecedented times. While the distillery last year sold us a cask one year younger of similar quality for $450 on the shelf, we're able to get an older (and I believe better) barrel of nearly identical first fill oloroso blue-chip single malt from Orkney at less than HALF the price. It's just insane to me that the people who distilled this couldn't find a use for it at somewhere in between $180 and $450. But, that's the magic of what we do at K&L. This barrel is so outrageously priced, I'm shocked that we still have any after the pre-arrival campaign. Heck we've been selling whiskies 7 years younger for nearly the same price! But I understand that even if on paper it looks good, you sometimes need to see it to believe it. SO, here we go. The color is a perfect tawny (1.4). The nose is absolute heaven but needs lots of air to fully express. Rich oloroso notes peppered with cooked yellow plums, extremely old antique leather, raspberry jam, roasted herbs, but as it opens it adds wild forest aromas of damp moss, old-growth pine, and citrus oil. On the palate the deep sherry character doesn't completely obliterate the rich smoky undertones that we love about Highland Park. Some IB barrels are completely devoid of the smoke element, but here is perfectly integrated to give that gorgeous ocean kiss and sweet burning heather. The finish is long spicy, but not tannic at all, with a building dark smoke in the very end. With a few drops of water, this turns into a whole different animal. The nose explodes—now vibrant dried stone fruit, deep roasted nuts and nougat, exotic spices too numerous to pinpoint. Now the palate is so rich and sweet yet the smoke stills lingers in the back. In many ways this is the perfect end of the night malt. There is no better way to spend an hour or two with an old friend than sipping this slowly after a long dinner. Should be about as perfect a cigar pair as you'll ever find if you're into that sort of thing, but in terms of value, we're in the upper echelons of what is possible in Scotch. A true triumph and honestly this crushes any previous Highland Park exclusives we've bottled. An exceptional malt by any measure, but give it time in the glass that it deserves.