Please accept my apologies. It’s been a while since I’ve had the chance to write a review. Essentially, we moved into a new home. Not to worry, I’ve not been distant from my collection in the least, merely busy with the days behind and before me. And so now, having first asked for your forgiving favor, and assuming it has been given, I offer the following…

“Something was crawling. Worse still, something was coming out. Edmund and Lucy or you would have recognized it at once, but Eustace had read none of the right books… Most of us know what we should expect to find in a dragon’s lair, but, as I said before, Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.”

C.S. Lewis takes a moment in his volume The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (which is, technically, book five in the Chronicles of Narnia series) to describe the influences of the character Eustace Scrubb who has now been surprisingly turned into a dragon. Eustace is a product of politically correct, progressive, intellectual liberalism. In fact, the book begins: “He didn’t call his Father and Mother ‘Father’ and ‘Mother,’ but Harold and Alberta. They were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotalers and wore a special kind of underclothes… (Eustace) liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.” The enlightenment offered by such references combined with the narration from his companion story-mates, it is to be assumed from Lewis’ pen that within Eustace’s personal library you would never find any volumes of creative fancy. But as he has now been suddenly whisked away and left to the superabundant wonders of Narnia, eventually becoming a dragon himself, Eustace is unappreciative of the beast in the reflection because he simply does not know what a dragon is and he isn’t equipped with the imagination necessary for assuming such a creature, real or mythological, into his universe.

And so now the whisky connection to this elaborate introduction… When it comes to whisky, the Glenmorangie Sonnalta PX is an opportunity for all of the Eustace Scrubbs of the world to know that there are reasonably priced elixirs to be embraced from brighter, more sunlit Narnian uplands than the “exports and imports and governments and drains” and the “fat foreign children” of Scoresby, Johnny Walker, or Clan Macgregor found on the shelves of the “model schools” of Kroger and Wal-Mart.

This particular edition from the “Scotch Thinkers” (as I like to call them) at Glenmorangie offers a slight nose of chocolate with a hint of the sherry cask in which it was finished. The palate is gentle, easily rolling over the tongue like the blooming flowers of a Narnian landscape. There is honey to be found, lightly decorating a dish of drying (not completely dried) pomegranates and peaches. The finish, returning to chocolate and sherry with which it enticed, is as the Gaelic suggests — Sonnalta! Generous! Robust and magical, this whisky will draw its consumer to believe in the unbelievable, that is, that such a luscious edition could be so reasonably available to a “Son of Adam” or a “Daughter of Eve.”

And so, my dear friend Eustace, cast away your unbelief. As you can clearly see, you are a dragon — a bumbling, ignorant, but mighty beast. The unbelievable is before you. Believe and give such credence in the same to a reasonable magic that I hold in my hand this very moment. Indeed, there are whiskies worthy of only kings, destined for lofty-price and exclusive cabinetry that you, too, may acquire. I tell you, it is the Glenmorangie Sonnalta PX.