The World’s Oldest Whiskey Bottle Is Up For Grabs
An ancient whiskey once owned by J.P. Morgan could fetch as much as $40,000 at auction.
If you thought you had a particularly old or rare whiskey in your personal collection, think again. The world’s oldest whiskey pre-dates the stuff in your bar cart by hundreds of years, and it’s going up for auction this summer.
This Old Ingledew Whiskey, bottled sometime between 1762 and 1802 (yes, potentially before the American Revolution), will be auctioned off by Skinner this June. As to the whiskey itself, the University of Georgia and Skinner used Carbon 14 dating to trace back the potential origins of the world’s oldest known whiskey.
The old-school bottle could be yours for as much as $40,000, based on auction projections. This stuff is exceedingly rare, and that’s still a massive understatement. The fact that it’s up for grabs is astonishing in and of itself.
It was bottled in La Grange, Georgia, potentially around the time of the Whiskey Rebellion (the rebellion saw farmers and distillers up in arms over a federal whiskey tax).
The story gets even more interesting from there. The Old Ingledew Whiskey is believed to have been purchased by J.P. Morgan (yes, that J.P. Morgan), then later gifted to former Supreme Court justice James Byrne by the financier.
The bottle includes a typed note that indicates it came from Morgan’s estate. From there, the whiskey passed hands to Byrne’s neighbor and close friend Francis Drake, where it stuck around for far longer (admittedly) than any whiskey tends to in our own bar carts.
Read This Next
