Scotch, watches and crazy money

We were tempted to hold on to last week’s report about the world’s ‘oldest’ Scotch whisky being inserted into an expensive watch for a couple more weeks. After all, it would seem to sit nicely alongside the stories of spaghetti plantations and sightings of the Loch Ness Monster traditionally reserved for that annual celebration of human gullibility, April Fools’ Day.

It’s just bizarre, isn’t it? Take what is reputed to be the world’s oldest Scotch whisky, Old Vatted Glenlivet 1862, and put a drop inside a perfectly good Swiss watch, then charge nearly £40,000 for it (there’s a sub-£15k version if you’re on a budget). I mean… why?

I can only assume either that the idea was borne out of an extremely long lunch, or that it was the result of an Alan Partridge-esque brainstorming session where the ideas became increasingly desperate. For ‘monkey tennis’ and ‘youth hostelling with Chris Eubank’, substitute ‘find the world’s oldest whisky and stick it in a watch’.

There are other objections too. This is the third similar venture from partners Louis Moinet and Wealth Solutions (the latter sounding uncannily like an Orwellian parody of itself), and each time the spirit in question has been chosen in the same way.

Cognac: Gautier 1762; rum: Harewood 1780. Now Glenlivet 1862 – in each case, the oldest example that could be found. But, unless you subscribe to a wholly Darwinian theory that only the best examples of a particular craft survive through the ages, this is a purely quantitative judgement.

Quantity over quality: This may be the world’s oldest Scotch, but is it any good?

Gautier 1762 may be the oldest Cognac anyone knows about, but the liquid itself might be awful. Ditto for Harewood, ditto for Glenlivet. It’s no different to an unquestioning belief that the oldest (in terms of maturation period) spirits are the best. Well, I’ve tasted 50-year-old rum, and it was bloody awful.

There’s almost an air of obscenity about the indulgence of the ‘whisky watch’; the kind of extravagant stunt they might have pulled during the most louche days of the Roman Empire, while tucking into some stuffed dormice and electing their horses to high public office.

But, underneath the hype and jaw-meets-floor pricing, the crazy whisky watch says something about the way the world now regards this product of malted and milled cereal grains, mixed with water, fermented, distilled and matured in oak.

It’s up there with Lafite and Pétrus, Louis XIII and Richard Hennessy; with Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Rolex (no disrespect to Louis Moinet).

At this level, whisky’s chosen apparel is Lalique crystal and ebony, not thin glass and a cardboard carton. And it deserves to move in those circles, because of the potentially transcendent sensory experience it can impart to the drinker, and the value people are willing to place upon that experience.

But that status comes with a price, and it’s a price that’s likely to extend into five figures, and into sometimes questionable areas of aesthetics. It’s what begins to happen when the world doesn’t undervalue you any more.