How to Know If Your Whisky Is Fake

Whisky is an alcoholic drink many are familiar to, distilled from fermented grain mash and aged in wooden casks. The name itself comes from Irish Gaelic, as is related to the Latin expression for the "water of life".

But what if yours tastes a bit funny, like a Johnny gone terribly wild, that peed in your glass instead of giving you the prized liqueur you were hoping for? You've probably been ripped off, and the product is actually a knock off that makes you wanna puke.

For people who can't really tell the difference, or have no balls to go to the bartender or the to the store clerk and show him the effect of gravity on a liquid flowing from a bottle smashed against a forehead, researchers in South Korea have a solution.

The solution is actually incredibly hi-tech, as local bottlers will be forced to incorporate radio frequency identification (RFID) chips in their 21-year-old whisky blends. According to Korea Times, the new ID technique will be imposed on producers starting next year. "Then people will easily be able to check through their cellphones whether or not any whisky is genuine," Assistant Minister of Information and Communication Yang Jun-Cheol was quoted as saying. That's nice, assuming that you bought the entire bottle.

Yang was quoted as saying the government plans to channel almost 312 billion won (340 million dollars) to 16 RFID-related projects through 2012, as for now the RIFD chips are much too expensive to be incorporated in every bottle.

However, with the help of the government, prices are expected to drop from 300 won, to as little as 10 won in the next decade. The measure is not so surprising, since in the first three quarters of 2006, sales of whisky at least 17-years-old reached 494,245 18-bottle boxes, an almost ten percent increase from the same period of 2005.

As much as I like the idea, I can imagine a tourist's face, when his native drinking companion reaches for the cellphone and says it must give the whisky bottle a phone call to make sure it's genuine... As the commercial says: priceless!