Robust, grubby smoke and sweet heat

The nose had bacon-wrapped dates, buffalo chicken wings and toffee apples; burning barns, "creosoting a garden fence" and "picking toffee out of an ashtray". The palate combined robust, grubby smoke with sweet heat – treacle toffee, liquorice, hot sauce and cinnamon biscotti, all eaten in a puffer’s engine room. The reduced nose suggested gammon steak with pineapple and prosciutto with melon, raisin fruitcake, dark rye crackers and tarry ropes in an old sailor’s chest. The palate now gave us cough drops, dried dates and French onion soup, bicycle inner tubes in a garden shed and "holding a spent firework in your teeth".