A mixture of sweet and fruity notes are predominant to start with; lemon meringue pie, buttered mandarin orange cake, Haribo crocodile sweets, rum soaked raisin and passion fruit sorbet. With time sultanas and nutmeg appear but all the while there is an ever so light clean smoke prevalent. The taste neat like eating ice cream in a humidor. Less sweet than on the nose with maritime flavours of oysters, shrimps and other shellfish more dominant. After adding water the aroma changes to spare ribs on a barbecue but still sweet; Scotch pancakes, milk chocolate and a flaming banana pizza. The taste is now minty, cooling and slightly salty and in the finish like an iced milk shake. This sample comes from the distillery whose 18 year-old single malt was crowned ‘best spirit in the world’.