Macallan Bottling Code

[whiskyone]

Hi guys, I have a 10 year old Macallan here in one of the older style bottles. I've looked through the bottle and I can see the following code printed on the inside of the label: L1216B L10 04/12 22:22

I assume the last bit is the day, month, and time, but I've no idea how to put a year on it. Can any Macallan boffins help please?

[Cuba]

Sometimes bottling codes give away the exact bottling time, day and date and sometimes only part of that info is obvious. The bottling codes are more for quality control and traceability for the manufacturers and most of the code means absolutely nothing to the buyer but will tell the manufacturers things such as the bottling line number, what whisky it is and perhaps batch number.

It is possible L10 in your code is a reference to the year which given it is the Macallan 10 year old it could well translate as 2010 but that is just a guess.

[Bookie]

This is what I have been told in the past:

L1216 is a vatting code used by the lab/blender
B is the bottling year 2002 so it follows on C = 2003, D = 2004, E = 2005
L10 is the bottling line
04/12 = 4th December (12th month)
22:22 = time 10:22pm

This translation of the bottling code may have changed since then.

[whiskyone]

Thanks for that. I suspected the bottle was probably from around 1999-2003, so that coding system seems quite plausible to me.