Nose: Cherries covered in dark chocolate, more cherries with water.

Palate:  Note: this was especially strong on the palate but opens up well with water.  Tasted at approx. 46%

Luscious velvety mouthfeel (reduced with water though).  Smooth and mossy.  The peat is very subtle.  The Ximinez cask left a light white grapey flavor (which is strange, even though Pedro Ximinez is a white grape).  Completely drammable, but not magnificent.

This is a bottle I have almost finished.  And it seems to have gotten better with more exposure to air.  I also feel the flavors need time to develop -- a whisky that needs a little water and even more air.

N: Cinnamon and sugar on apples in an unbaked pie, wet leaves, turing to a baking pie, apple, then cherry

P: Subtle and hard to determine. Then heat grows and explodes. Rhubarb, dried apricots, with water more sweet and cherry flavors. Then chocolate covered raisins. After savoring a while, the peat finally comes thru when the fruit has died away, but it is so well balanced by some sherry sweetness.  The structure is rich and somewhat oily. Holds all these flavors well.

F:  Cools and lingers for quite some time, the spicey notes come out more here.

Definitely one to take your time with, not the best to just throw in a tasting of many other whiskies.  Very complex and rich if you let it talk to you for a while.  

A- but just barely.  This makes me think of something like smoked prunes.  The leather and rubber add something rather than take it away.  The cherries in the nose don't really make it to the palate.  I wish they did.  I think the nose for me screams A but the palate speaks more of a B.  Very rich and not something I would drink a whole lot of at a single sitting.  A very good malt and I really enjoyed it.

PLOWED Vertical re-taste 4/19/2013

Fresh Bottle is very different than the one I have at home that has been open for a couple of years.  (I use Private Reserve to avoid oxidation) The new bottle was more bright and(as SKU would put it) pushy.  The least favorite of the PLOWED bottles for me.  Although least favorite still makes this an "A-."

N: Slightly funky, light smoke which is in a shoving match with PX sweetness. That PX sweetness is really dark, and becomes a more overt note on the nose as it breathes. 

P: Sweetness up front, almost a black cherry quality. There's a little smoke on the tail end, and a touch of pepper.

F: Slight rubbery smoke, black cherry, and that kind of uneasy but mostly workable balance of smoke versus dark sweetness.

Air helps this a lot, and the interplay of dark fruit and light smoke is great, but I wish this would chill out a tad.  

The nose on this was bipolar for me. It was meaty and full, yet tame at the same time. I'm not sure what I meant by that in my notes, but I was a fan. 

Palate starts off kind of weak, but a bold sweetness that I really like rushes through all of a sudden. 

Wow, this malt really flaunts it's stuff in the finish! A really nice light peat flows through here and mixes in with that sweet, almost marmalade flavor.

A-/B+