Emotive Malts - Adelphi Bunnahabhain 2009 / 10 Year Old #900022 58.9%

Monsieur de la Riviere stubbed out his Gitanes and polished off his pastis as the sun glinted off the Mediterranean - its light piercing through the stench of last night's dinners that had washed out onto the streets from the innumerable restaurants that adorned the dock front of Marseille. 

The tang of salty seaweed and engine oil from bobbing cargo vessels added interest to the rich aroma which combined with scents of garigue rolling in from the mainland. He could still taste the herbal remnants of last night’s one too many Jagermeisters, consumed excessively before he had rolled into his favourite bordello to round off the evening with some exercise.

Now he was hungry and the salty sea air had primed him for crustaceans, fish or molluscs - or, even better, a melange of them all. He barked a dry cough and threw a cough sweet into his mouth, then got up and dropped into a narrow cobbled side street, where the buildings pendulously arched past ninety degrees, darkening proceedings to the extent that the street lights were still illuminated despite it being daytime.

He followed his nose, guided by the scents of fennel and cream and white wine until he arrived at the doorway of his favourite café. Walking in, he was enveloped by a welcoming cloud of culinary goodness and spotted the large copper cooking pot bubbling over a wood fire. It had reportedly never been turned off, nor removed from the fire - and in effect it was like a solera of seafood - the older stuff at the bottom and the new being fed in at the top.

It was, in his opinion, Marseille’s best bouillabaisse and he began to salivate at the thought of it. He slumped into a chair as his usual bowl was placed in front of him with a glass of the house white, and removed the cough sweet from his mouth and began to eat, watching as tentacles and unidentifiable appendages reared up out of the soup. The licorice tang of the cough sweet combined with the rich salty soup of sea creatures in the most splendid fashion.

He swigged at his wine to cut through the creaminess, noticing burnt notes, most probably from whatever had been scraped from the bottom of the pot. It was a brunch fit for a king, he thought, and would be the perfect stomach liner for another tilt at the vin rouge tonight...