i imagine few people these days have a drinks cupboard in their office.
Like the three martini lunch, once a staple of American business life, it belongs to a different era - that of Mad Men. But in an elegant Edinburgh crescent near Haymarket, Alan Park's office has a whole bookshelf crammed full of whisky bottles. Don Draper would be impressed.
Sadly not all is what it seems, for every single bottle on display is Scotch whisky by aspiration. The shelves represent a Brigadoon-like pastiche of our national drink with a cast of bagpipers and clan chiefs against a backdrop of misty hills, castles, and glens you have never heard of.
Welcome to behind the scenes at the Scotch Whisky Association (SWA) where Lane is one of five lawyers employed to drain the ever-filling loch of counterfeit Scotch.
Gazing at the rogue's gallery of fakes in his collection, I wonder if the industry shouldn't feel a little flattered. "Well, that's one way of looking at it," says Lane, deadpan. "But we have to take a much broader view. We have a zero tolerance approach to Scotch whisky of another origin."
He shows me a Bulgarian bottle of Highlander that displays a desperate, almost comic, desire to be Scottish with a label full of tartan and heather. Though it just avoids calling itself Scotch with expressions like "pure malt" and "special blend", the Bulgarians proved no match for the legal eagles of the SWA. Their half-hearted defence of: "Well, you get Highlands all over the world" was swiftly rejected.
Other examples are named after make-believe glens and curious surnames like the MacAlbert whisky from the Dominican Republic. Then there's Viagra Royal, dressed up like Chivas Regal, and Grant's Regal Deluxe which bares the words: "Be assured of its complex excellence" - an unlikely claim since it comes in a can.
That one was passed to the SWA by a German businessman in Iraq, and traced back to Austria where the crooks were caught, having sold an estimated 15 million cans in Turkey and the Middle East.
While a surprising number of fakes come from Australia, my favourite was Glen Highland Green Blended Whisky from China. The box comes with the following promise: "The Scottish whisky will penetrate your blood vessel, all the way to the capillary, makes you in total comfort, this is what we call the Purity."
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