Captivating collections
Extensive, painstaking research into newspaper archives and historical records, forensic studies, chemical analysis, and good old-fashioned detective work has revealed that the brown-glass bottle embossed with ‘Evans & Ragland LaGrange, GA,’ a grocer and bottler, contains the oldest American whiskey in the world. Distilled sometime between 1763 and 1803, it’s going up for sale at Skinner Auctioneers in late June and the hammer price is expected to be around US$40,000 (GBP£28,745). [This issue printed before the auction took place.]
That’s a veritable bargain compared to the $1.04 million (£751,703) realised by The Macallan Peter Blake 1926 60 Years Old at Bonhams in Hong Kong in 2018. Or the Yamazaki 55 Years Old that sold for a cool $645,125 (£466,989) at Bonhams last August, setting a record for Japanese whiskies at auction.
America’s whiskey industry is, of course, younger than Scotland’s and less exotic than Japan’s, but bourbons and ryes have
