I have learned that if I want to watch a scary movie with my wife, I should prepare to hear a running “commentary” of sorts; never a silent thought, sometimes interrogative, sometimes declarative, always happening. The funny thing is, I like it. She’s always done it and if she didn’t, I’d probably rush her to the hospital for an MRI.

However…

Last night, I learned that my teenage son is composed of a larger percentage of Jen’s scary-movie-watching DNA than mine. We watched “World War Z” and it wasn’t too long before I realized that together, Jen and Josh form a supernatural bond that allows for them to receive through a sixth sense all that is happening in the movie. As for the rest of us watching, we have no idea what is going on except for what we can discern and deduct from the visuals…because we certainly cannot hear the dialogue. Instead, what is heard sounds more like this…and mind you, it is not a whispering back and forth. It’s full on shouting over the movie:

“That was his dad!”

“No it wasn’t!”

“Yeah, it was! I’m telling you, that was his dad!”

“No way!”

“And that was his mom hanging onto the helicopter!”

“Oh, no! They’re infected?!”

“Yeah, they should’ve gone with Gerry.”

“Why didn’t they just go with him?!”

“Yeah, I know, right!”

“We’ll, they just adopted another kid into the family!”

“I can’t take this!”

“Can we fast forward through this part?!”

“I can’t take this!”

“Me either! Can we fast forward?!”

As you can see, together, they are a formidable barrier to enjoyable movie going.

Now I tell this tale as it relates to the Glenmorangie Ealanta. Technically, “Ealanta” is Gaelic for “expert” (even though the Glenmorangie marketers offer somewhat of a label embellishment by saying it means “skilled and ingenious”). But perhaps I’ll go with the term “skilled” since this is the whisky I selected as my refreshment during the movie…and it took great skill, as I have already shared, to actually watch it. Between constantly asking them to be quiet, needing to rewind a bit to hear what was said, fighting over who would rule the remote control, threatening to go upstairs and go to bed unless they quieted (which gained about 15 whole seconds of silence each time), sneaking the remote control from Jen and turning up the volume after she turned it down because the zombie screams were too scary, and getting smacked in the face with a blanket each time it was pulled up in front of their eyes; yep, Ealanta pretty much described this shenanigan.

Of course, I am one to look on the bright side. Having no ability to concentrate on the film, and not really being able to say if I actually liked it, I was able to actually savor a few short drams of this gem from Glenmorangie for 116 minutes and once again affirm this distillery as one of my favorites.

The nose is familiar to the Glenmorangie signature — honeyed, but the honey sweetness lingers only momentarily as the scent changes to offer a hint of a spicy, maybe even roasted, apple. The palate, a delightful plate of flavors, the most prominent being the Ozark wood used to keep this precious vintage in slumber. The spiced apple returns but is washed away in a medium finish of vanilla and another fruit I can’t place. I want to say pineapple. In fact, now that I actually see what I have typed, I need to go back and try the Finealta edition. I’m having a flashback.

Normally I do my whisky tasting while sitting in my chair in silence. I suppose that an extreme and sensory-overloaded cinematic experience of surrealistic proportion, in the end, afforded me the same ability to concentrate. But I guess that part of being an expert means being able to “turn it on” when it counts.