Authenticating Whisky Without Touching a Drop

The Gaelic word ‘whisky’ can roughly be translated into English as ‘water’ and so it comes as no surprise that sales of the golden liquid are worth roughly £5 billion annually to Scotland’s economy. As with many premium products, whisky is a favourite target for counterfeiters, which not only takes income away from the legitimate brand owner but deprives revenue authorities of much needed taxes.

Iconic bottles of whisky have been known to sell for prices of over £1 million, but in a well-publicised incident in 2017 a collector paid a world-record £7,600 for a single dram (roughly equivalent to an eggcup full) of a rare whisky, only to later discover he had been sold a knock-off.

So, if you are the lucky owner of such a whisky, how can you be confident that the contents of the bottle are the genuine product without having to dip into the precious liquid to run an assay?