The market for vintage spirits is booming, but so is the one for fakes. Meet the experts helping enthusiasts avoid a costly mistake
‘Poor guy,’ thought Isabel Graham-Yooll, examining a few dozen bottles of rare whisky that a collector had sent to her London office for appraisal in late 2016. ‘Someone’s conning him.’
As a respected authority with more than 15 years’ experience in high-value vintage spirits, Graham-Yooll had identified a pair of flawed examples among the bona fide bottles that the collector was hoping to sell through Whisky.Auction, the specialist online platform where she works as auction director. One had a screw-top closure whose design wasn’t quite period-correct; the contents of another weren’t precisely the right colour. ‘Genuine bottles are all the same,’ she says. ‘The forged ones are always different.’
Given the micro-inconsistencies of these ‘exceptionally fine-quality forgeries’, Graham-Yooll could hardly blame the collector, believed to be German, for being taken in. ‘Any serious collector will have been offered fakes,’ she says, ‘and might accidentally end up with one or two.’ Yet the prospective vendor seemed curiously unfazed when Graham-Yooll alerted him, and after he sent further batches that proved to be a similar mix of authentic bottles and high-end counterfeits, her boss Sukhinder Singh arranged for them to drop in at his home in Finchley, north London, under the pretext of making a private purchase.
Singh may well know more about rare, collectable whiskies than anyone else in the country. His obsession took root at the off licence his parents ran in Hanwell, west London: by the time he left school, he had assembled one of the UK’s largest collections of whisky miniatures. Today, in addition to running Whisky.Auction, he is co-managing director of The Whisky Exchange, an online portal whose rarest bottles come with six-figure price tags. At this end of the market, you have to really, really know your stuff.