Macallan fakes
Quote 1: We [at Macallan] started back in … 1996 with an 1874 bottle which was, at the time, the oldest bottle of Macallan we’d been able to track down. We’d bought it at auction … [and I] thought wouldn’t it be a great fun to be able to taste a whisky that had been made all those years ago. So we opened it and were amazed to find that it was similar — not identical — but similar to some casks we come across today. — David Robertson, Macallan distillery
Quote 2: The Scotsman has learned that far from being some of the oldest whisky in the world, the liquid inside the bottles [at Macallan’s whisky museum] is not Victorian at all but dates from the late 1980s.… After a year-long investigation by the Macallan board, during which sample bottles were sent to Oxford University for … testing, it emerged that the liquid content inside the bottles is “modern”, in some cases as young as ten years old. — William Lyons, The Scotsman newspaper
Hmmm. Maybe we shouldn’t be entirely amazed that the “ancient” Macallans taste so modern. (This is just speculation. There is no hard evidence as of yet that the particular 19th century Macs used as templates for the replicas series were fakes. And in any case, no one I know of is accusing Macallan of intentionally perpetrating a hoax — seems like they were scammed just like everyone else.)
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March 13th, 2007 at 7:57 am
But the replicas are some of the nicest Macallan’s that I’ve tasted. Of course I suppose they are different from most Macallan’s in that they are blended, but still, Johnny Walker is blended and I think it taste like arse.