To the casual eye, there was nothing amiss about the bottle of whiskey sitting on a shelf at Acker, a wine store on New York’s Upper West Side. But for anyone who knew what to look for, the warning signs were clear.
The whiskey, a bourbon called Colonel E.H. Taylor Four Grain that Acker was selling for about $1,000, normally came packaged in a special cardboard tube; this one sat there tubeless. Its strip stamp, attached over the top of the cork, was on backward.
Still, when a producer from the TV news program “Inside Edition” asked in April about the bottle’s authenticity, the store assured him it was legitimate.
The producer bought the whiskey, then took it to Buffalo Trace, the Kentucky distillery that makes the Colonel E.H. Taylor line of bourbon, for chemical analysis. The bottle, it turned out, was fake: It had been refilled with cheap whiskey and resealed, then sold to Acker as part of a private collection.
