I’m going drop this knowledge right now: £24,000 on a bottle of whisky borders on insanity. Thankfully, I got my wee dram for free. There’s a reason I’m in this business, and it certainly isn’t the fat paycheques (of which there are none).

The nose is expensive. I know, right? Duh. But expensive in the whisky sort of way. It smells of leather and stained wood and exotic fruits soaked in brandy. The fruitiness is particularly potent, and it’s backed by a heat that comes not so much from booze, but from the dryness of long barrel-ageing.

The palate is also expensive. Varnish and polish and figs and cocoa. There’s more palo cortado than oloroso, and that’s not a bad thing at all. The texture is pervasive, fine-grained and rich, it coats the tongue. There’s a high-toast note. It is a little hot - again, most likely because of the long time in barrel, but there’s also quite a luxurious sweetness to it as well. It’s intense, like a posh petit four at a michelin star restaurant. Utterly delicious in small bites, but possibly a bit too much to handle in large quantities. The smallest drop of water brings a little more unity between the sweet and savoury. It is an astonishingly good dram, though if I'm going to get nit-picky (at £24,000, I'm allowed to be nit-picky), all the various woods and finishes don't seem to be quite as harmonious as they should be. Like it wasn't given long enough to marry.

Anyway, it's still really, really, good. It’s not down-payment-on-a-three-bedroom-house-in-Fife good, but it’s really good.

Tasted 30 June 2017 somewhere in Chiswick