It's all lies.

It's all lies. Never using Nielsen-Massey vanilla again. I swear it didn't used to, but when did I last look? Well, I did today and they add sugar to their extract. What the? It's a super premium product at a super premium price that became widely used because people like Chuck Williams and Martha Stewart promoted it and touted its virtues when pretty much everyone was still using corn syrup, propylene glycol, and beaver glands. Oo, real vanilla bean in real bourbon left to age, nom nom nom! Maybe it was 20-30 years ago when they started promoting it, but it sure ain't now. 

Ugh. Now I have to go around trying different vanilla extracts. I don't bake sufficiently often to do that, nor do I really have the money to do that. I could make my own, but then I'd have to sample a bunch of bourbons to see which I liked best as the base flavor, also a costly proposition. Besides, while the basic flavors are there after about 48 hours, the stuff keeps aging for up to two years to get more complexity and depth to the vanilla flavors and I'm not waiting two years.

Irony? None of the cheap McCormick, Spice Islands, and store brands contain anything except vanilla and alcohol, maybe sometimes water. No corn syrup, no sugar, no beaver (ok, nobody's used that for years afaik). To the best of my limited info, using sugar or corn syrup was to cover up the unpleasant after tastes from synthetic vanilla flavoring or to hide the fact that you had not aged the vanilla extract. So long, Nielsen-Massey, you are not worth the exorbitant price tag.