Refund as £ 7,700 dram confirmed to be a fake
Hotel manager flies to Asia to repay Chinese customer
A Chinese author who paid £ 7,700 for a dram of 19th century whisky has been refunded by the Swiss hotel where it was bought after the drink was officially deemed a fake by an investigation.
The probe was launched in the summer after the customer, multi-millionaire online fantasy writer Zhang Wei, paid for a dram of what was thought to be one of the world’s only known bottles of Macallan 1878 still in circulation.
But following a series of investigative and forensic tests carried out by Scottish whisky valuation service Rare Whisky 101, in conjunction with the hotel, the Waldhaus Am See in St Moritz, the whisky has been shown to date back no further than 1970, deeming it almost worthless as a collector’s item. Hotel manager Sandro Bernasconi flew to Asia over the last week to refund the paying customer in full.
The sale hit the headlines as the most expensive dram ever bought in July, but whisky collectors raised a number of concerns about the bottle, including the condition of the cork and alleged historical inaccuracies on the label.
RW101 co-founder David Robertson said :“We’ ve noticed an increasing number of old, rare archive or antique bottles coming to market at auction, and it’ s difficult to know how prevalent this problem is.”
Sandro Bernasconi, Waldhaus Am See hotel manager and bar manager at the Devils Place bar where the whisky was sold, said: “When it comes to selling our customers some of the world’s rarest and oldest whiskies, we felt it was our duty to ensure that our stock is 100 per cent authentic and the real deal. The result has been a big shock to the system, and we are delighted to have repaid our customer in full as a gesture of goodwill.”
A sample of the Mac allan 1878 was collected by the team at RW101, and flown back to the UK for analysis to determine its precise composition, including carbon dating at the University of Oxford to verify the year of distillation.
Subsequent laboratory tests showed the spirit was most likely a blended Scotch comprised of 60 per cent malt and 40 per cent grain.