mislabeled Scotch?

[Megawatt]

A while back I bought two bottles of Auchentoshan 10 from the same location at the same time. One went to my buddy and the other I kept. Mine was very smokey, much to my surprise. I didn't really enjoy it. I tried the other bottle last night, which my friend has barely drank from. It was an entirely different whisky, much more what I had expected from this Lowland malt. It made me wonder if I just got a weird bottling, or if maybe the bottling plant had stuck an Auchentoshan label on a bottle of Bowmore. Would this be possible, or are they bottled at the distilleries? I know Morrison Bowmore owns both of them, so it made me wonder...

[boss302]

A while back I bought two bottles of Auchentoshan 10 from the same location at the same time. One went to my buddy and the other I kept. Mine was very smokey, much to my surprise. I didn't really enjoy it. I tried the other bottle last night, which my friend has barely drank from. It was an entirely different whisky, much more what I had expected from this Lowland malt. It made me wonder if I just got a weird bottling, or if maybe the bottling plant had stuck an Auchentoshan label on a bottle of Bowmore. Would this be possible, or are they bottled at the distilleries? I know Morrison Bowmore owns both of them, so it made me wonder...

Only very few distilleries actually bottle their own spirit, so the scenario you postulated is very possible.

[LeoDLion]

If both bottle is labeled as Auchentoshan 10 then it was bottled by the same company- probably the distillery itself. As for the taste, its possible that from cask to cask the whisky might change in characteristics e.g. taste, smell, look, aftertaste. But to be remarkably different from one another is unheard of if coming from the same cask.

I also observe that my taste changes. Even drinking from the same bottle, I taste the same whisky differently than the previous dram. A'bunadth sometimes have a bitter aftertaste and yet on other occasion its absent and its from the same bottle drinking days apart.