Ah, the Florida vacation home. Everything the sun-loving visitor could need is in its place and ready.

The air conditioning is set at 70. The carpet still retains the tracks from a recent vacuuming—although there is a rather obvious splatter stain in one of the hallways. Even so, the excitement is blinding—and so are the kitchen and dining room tiles as they beam brightly from a recent mopping.

The beds are squared in bright colors. The master closet is abundantly stocked with fresh towels, linens, DVDs, and board games. The toilets and showers are virtuous. The washer and dryer doors are open to remind of the freedom to use them. Through the patio door, the pool chairs are pleasantly arranged in a row. In their embrace are brightly colored floating devices meant for adult and child alike. Just beyond them, the sparkling blue swimming pool catches the sun’s smile and sends it glistening through to the windows to the kitchen’s ceiling where the refrigerator hums as it waits to be filled with the travelers’ favorite treats.

The cupboards are stocked with a single-family’s measure of plates, bowls, and various sorts of drinkware. The cabinets offer cookware in the same proportions. Two drawers hold the necessary utensils for meal preparation. Another drawer, cleanly sorted by category, holds the silverware required for the meal’s consumption. A fourth drawer is hefty and opens with a clank.

It’s filled with knives—like, a billion of them.

Sure, there’s a pizza cutter and a cheese slicer in there, but there’s also a gazillion duplicates of just about every type of knife known to man—butcher knives, steak knives, boning knives, bread knives, paring knives, and a multitude of other types. One glance at the drawer’s contents has its inspector wondering out loud, “If after the final episode of ‘Game of Thrones,’ was the Iron Throne disassembled and all of its cutlery brought here? Would a trip to the garage reveal the throne’s skeletal frame and only confirm my concern?”

Another glance at the stockpile stirs uneasy suspicion regarding the stain on the carpet near the front door. Was someone trying to escape this place?

No one needs this many knives, folks. Not Gordon Ramsay. Not Hannibal Lecter. Not a circus family intent on perfecting its knife-throwing routine. No one.

On second thought, there might be at least one legitimate reason for having this many knives at the ready.

Guns are essentially banned in England, so if there’s an outbreak of zombies, it’s pretty much going to be a hand-to-hand combat situation involving knives. I would suspect that most folks in England have at least one drawer like this in their kitchens. They know they need some sort of self-defense arsenal.

But there’s still a problem with this particular drawer. It’s not in England. It’s in Florida.

You know, Ted Bundy lived in Florida for a while, and I’ll bet it was a badge of honor for Ted to have a drawer like this in his home.

But again, for the rest of us, there’s no reason—not one that aligns with normalcy—to have a drawer brimming with knives in our home. It gives the wrong impression.

There’s also no reason for the Kurayoshi Sherry Cask edition to be topped with a screwcap instead of a cork. I know it sounds a bit snobbish to say this. And I know that screwcaps are becoming more and more popular because they seem to do a better job at protecting whisky from oxygenation and crumbling cork residue. But like it or not, we remain well-entrenched in the mess of first impressions steered by assumptions. A screwcap remains a badge that communicates little more than efficient production leading to massive distribution and a place on the bottom shelf. Until one of the luxury whiskies begins using screwcaps—someone like The Macallan or The Balvenie—this stigma will remain.

Kurayoshi is an exceptional whisky worthy of top shelf placement, and I fear its screwcap might give the wrong impression.

An initial nosing of the Kurayoshi is a penetrating pear slice sprinkled with almond cocoa. A second sniff is sharpened by the sherry.

The palate is a little harder to discern at first. But given a moment to open, the sherry emerges, and behind it comes the pears and cocoa promised in the nose.

The whisky’s finish is merely a surgeon’s mark past the edge of short. It cuts along this border with malt, wheat toast, and little bit of blackberry sour.

Too bad I didn’t find a cupboard or cabinet filled with Kurayoshi Sherry Cask editions instead of a drawer brimming with knives. A locker with forty or fifty bottles of this stuff certainly would’ve been a lot less weird.