The $10000-a-dram 'vintage Scotch' that turned out to be fake

Washington D.C. [USA], Nov 4 (ANI): A bottle of Scotch whisky, which was thought to be so rare that a popular Chinese writer shelled out more than $10,000 for just a dram, has turned out to be fake.

Writer Zhang Wei bought a peg from the unopened bottle of "Macallan 1878" for the five-figure sum at a Swiss hotel because for him, it was more than Scotch; it was a piece of history, The Washington Post reported.

Later, Zhang took to Weibo, a Chinese microblogging platform similar to Twitter, to describe his experience, saying the whisky "had a good taste." He stressed, though, that, "It's not just the taste, but also history."

However, whisky experts smelled a rat after news of the sale broke, after which Manager Sandro Bernasconi of The Waldhaus Hotel in St Moritz hired investigators to examine the $350,000 bottle.

Andy Simpson, the company's co-founder, organised a test and found the high-end grog bottle was filled with a blended whisky, probably distilled between 1970 and 1972 - about a century from the dram of history Zhang Wei thought he had purchased.

Carbon dating by the Oxford University researchers further showed that the near-worthless blended Scotch dated no earlier than 1970 - a hundred years younger than it was claimed.

The bottle turned out to be "almost worthless as a collector's item."

Bernasconi flew to China to apologise and personally pay back the dosh.

"He thanked me very much for the hotel's honesty and said his experience in Switzerland had been good," Bernasconi stated.

(ANI)