First things first: That picture is EXACTLY what I’d think the world’s oldest bottle of whiskey would look like. It looks exactly like a prop bottle of whiskey you’d see in any old time movie that takes place in the 1800’s. Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, True Grit, Back to the Future III, any of the great Westerns ever made. That’s the type of bottle that you see the bartender serve a grifter after he walks into the saloon and throws a doubloon on the counter saying only one word: ‘Whiskey.’
So apparently they’ve been able to carbon date this bottle’s date range as being made anywhere between 1762 and 1802. All sarcasm aside: That’s pretty freaking cool. I think they’re estimating that this bottle will sell on the auction block for between $20,000-$40,000 dollars, and if we were living in a world where I would have bought Gamestop stock at the right time, I would almost certainly throw some frivolous money at this bottle. Just something about a bottle of booze that might have been crafted BEFORE the American Revolution appeals to my sense of history as well as my sense of enjoying a stiff drink.
And that last part leads me to my next question: Let’s say you put a bid in and win this bottle for $40k, do you open it and take a sip? Almost have to, right? I don’t think I’d be able to stop thinking about it until I did. What in the world does whiskey make in the 1700’s taste like. And what would it do to the lining of your stomach. I’d think that would be a pretty tense waiting game as well. Further: What does the hangover a night after drinking whiskey from 1762 look like. I have a lot of question and not enough money to find out the answers.
PS: Every Sunday morning, Lindsey and I watch CBS Sunday Morning. It’s the best show on TV. Those trumpets hit at 8am and it’s nothing but good vibes until 9:30am. Well, one morning, they did a story on a Revolutionary-Era apple whiskey that is still popular, and still in production: Laird’s Apple Jack:
Apparently the Laird family has been making some version of this in New Jersey since 1698! So we bought a bottle the next time we went to the liquor store and I have to say it’s pretty tasty. I’d give it a solid 8.1/10 on a totally arbitrary scale. And I never would have heard of it if I could still sleep in until noon like I did on Sunday’s when I was 22.
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