The World’s Oldest Whiskey is About to be Sold at Auction
martyb writes:
The World's Oldest Whiskey Is About To Be Sold At Auction:
This summer, the world's oldest known whiskey is going under the hammer: a legendary bottle of Old Ingledewbourbon. If you want a chance at owning it you'll be able to put in a bid with Skinner Auctioneers between June 22 through June 30. Exactly how old is the liquid, itself? Well, nobody knows for sure since its comes from a time before modern labeling practices had been established. But scientific analysis affords a high degree of probability that it entered the glass sometime between 1763 and 1803. Pretty historic hooch, to be sure.
Even more so when you consider its chain of custody. In a press release, Skinner Auctioneers states that the bourbon-which is estimated to sell for $20,000 to $40,000-was purchased by John Pierpoint Morgan (yes, that Morgan) during one of his frequent visits to Georgia in the late 1800s. At the time, it would have been stored in demijohn: an ovular glass vessel usually measuring around 15 gallons in volume. Commercial bottling had only just begun in 1870 with Old Forester in Louisville, Kentucky. The practice had yet to become widespread.
So, Morgan paid a visit to a specialty grocer in LaGrange to have several decanters-worth of the liquid bottled. His son Jack eventually ended up with a portion of the stock, gifting it to personalities no less prominent than US Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
The Skinner auction house sent tiny samples out for Carbon-14 analysis. Their conclusion? The whiskey was bottled sometime between 1776 and 1794.
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