A sleuth from one of the local wine and spirit dealers recently performed an excellent piece of detective work in a spiritous manner and unearthed large stores of whisky masquerading under well-known proprietary names which had been no closer to the banks and braes of Scotland than Hongkew. One thing he discovered was that there was no lack of properly labelled bottles owing to the iniquitous business of trading in labelled bottles for re-Alling purposes. In Japan, where a serious effort has been made for years to produce a decent brand of whisky on the Scotch style, a serious difficulty has been experienced, Like all products, war exigencies have affected Japanese whisky distillation with results which may profoundly affect quality. According to the "Osaka Mainichi," there "are two places where Scotch whisky is made. One is, of course, Scotland. The other is a little town with the non-Gaelic name of Yamazaki, situated in the highlands ihat lie between Osaka and Kyoto." Originally, barley used to be imported from Scotland but now it is grown in the Yamazaki vicinity, and although the liquor is distilled far from the land of the heather and thistle, it has a sound Scotch ancestry and is claimed to possess 5 sound Scottish flavour. Aged in the cask for 12 years is the claim attached to the best brand buf Japanese self-sufficiency has resulted in the fact that only the casks are now imported. The war is altering this method. Charred sherry barrels were brought in from abroad, which, after containing whisky for a decade or so have to be recharred and put back in the sherry trade, if the gastronomic editor of this journal is to be believed. Imports are now under. the rigid control of the Japanese Government and sherry casks may no longer be imported. With the stoic determination of a race not to be defeated by government restrictions, experiments are being conducted to find a type of barrel which will meet the necessary conditions formerly provided by imported sherry barrels, but there is a plaintive hint in the article that whatever may be the scientific standard of the distillation process, the seal set on the perfection of the product and its competition with brands produced among the heather of Scotland, lis largely dependent on those time-worn barrels now unobtainable,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.