A Chinese multimillionaire paid £7,600 for a dram of 1878 Macallan single malt – only to find out later than it was distilled no earlier than the 1970s.

Experts questioned the claims about the bottle after having read about the record-breaking price, and Scottish experts were called in. Not only was the age wrong, but the whisky was not even a single malt.

The Waldhaus Am See hotel in St Moritz, which stocks some 2,500 brands of whisky, has refunded the customer, writer Zhang Wei, 36, from Beijing, who BBC said.

Mr Zhang, who earned the equivalent of about $16.8m in 2015, according to China Daily, was on holiday in Switzerland.

Waldhaus manager Sandro Bernasconi told BBC Scotland that the hotel had no idea the bottle was a fake.

He said: "My father bought the bottle of Macallan 25 years ago, when he was manager of this hotel, and it had not been opened.”