August 31, 2011 • 17 mins
The second episode of this two-part podcast covers historic alcohol that's still (mostly) drinkable. Tune in to learn more about the world's oldest Champagne, a bottle of beer from the Hindenburg, and whisky from the failed Endurance expedition.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Deblane and Chocolate Barding and I'm fair And we
just did an episode on that was a sampling of
historic spirits, and we mostly focused on that episode on
(00:23):
ancient alcohols. So the truly old finds that were found,
as Sarah put it, gunk, the gunky alcohol, the gunky
alcohols that were found as residues some might say, on
old pottery, things that were found in two vessels. Yes,
so not really stuff that you can drink. And in
this portion of the episode, the second part, we're going
(00:47):
to focus on older alcohols that you could taste if
you came across one exactly, So things that are still drinkable,
maybe not necessarily delicious alcohol, not all alcohol ages well,
but something that does still have a liquid property to it.
Most of these are hundreds of years old or even
(01:07):
less than a hundred years old, whereas in the last
episode we were talking about alcohol residues that were thousands
of years old. But in this case researchers can still
study what's in the bottle chemically analyze it, but they
can also sample it we're not going to just talk
about old alcohol though. We're going to talk about some
finds that aren't really that old. After all. They're just
(01:30):
really interesting historically, they're connected to an important historical event
or an important historical figure, and we thought they were
worth including. Yeah, they're just cool stories in a lot
of cases. And this first one that we're going to
start with is a story that I think a lot
of people have probably heard about because it was so
recent it made the news. In July two thousand ten,
(01:52):
Swedish divers were exploring a wreck in the Baltic just
south of the Oland Islands between Sweden and Finland. At
two feet visibility was really bad. They couldn't see any
identifying info on the ship or locate the bell, but
they did find some bottles, most of them undamaged, and
they decided to take some up and try to date
(02:12):
the wreck that way. It turned out that they were
about one hundred and forty five bottles of champagne on
this ship, very likely the oldest champagne in the world,
and the dates in this really interested me, kind of
perplexed me a little. Almost every article we came across
puts the shipwreck at eighteen hundred to eighteen thirty, and
(02:34):
the alcohol obviously around that same period. I did find
one outlier, though, one date that is significantly before that,
and it kind of made some of the points that
the articles made, mentioning that perhaps this alcohol was a
shipment from Louis the sixteenth of France to the Imperial
Court of Russia, which if we're talking eight hundred eighteen thirty,
(02:55):
that doesn't make sense because Louis was dead. These dates
make it seem a little more natural. The Champagne included
bottles of of Cluko, which is one of the finest
brands of Champagne even today, and that brand was first
made in seventeen seventy two, but those bottles were laid
down for at least ten years, so using that day,
(03:16):
it seemed like the wreck couldn't be older than seventeen
eighty two, but couldn't be after eight or eighty nine
because the Champagne houses production was disrupted obviously during the
French Revolution, so a little discrepancy. They're not entirely sure
about when this wreck really happened, judging by the articles
written on it, and once they figure out more details
(03:38):
about the wreck, that may become more clear. So the
story they're still developing, But what about the champagne itself?
Does it really last that long? And apparently we find that, yes,
it does. I love the story. I love when you're
reading the stories about when they brought the champagne up
and it's like that. Some stories say that the divers
that when they brought it up the pressure of coming
(03:59):
to the surface the cork, or maybe they popped the
cork themselves, but they tasted it expecting to taste seawater
and found that no, in fact, it actually tasted good.
It tasted just like champagne, and an old and wine
expert who sampled the bottle described it as absolutely fabulous.
She even described looking at the samples in her fridge
after they weren't being consumed anymore and just thinking it
(04:21):
was absolutely miraculous that she had these. So it turns
out that the Baltic made a pretty great storage spot
for champagne for really long term storage. It's got a
constant cold temperature, but it's never going to freeze and
there's no light which can quickly degrade champagne. So even
though some of these champagne bottles may have been cracked
(04:42):
or the corks had corroded and maybe ruined the taste.
A lot of them were still intact, and they were
available in November for a taste when there were two
bottles were cracked open. A Bloomberg writer named Richard Vines
described it thus. He said that the jugular was quote
remarkably fresh, the fist had all almost gone, and it
was too sweet for today's palette. Yet it retained a
(05:03):
distinctive smell of orange and raisins, like a Christmas cake.
It might still be served as a dessert wine. Well,
So that description must have been pretty tantalizing to some people, apparently,
because two bottles of the champagne, one of two different kinds,
sold for fifty four thousand euros, which is the equivalent
to seventy eight thousand, nine hundred and seventy five dollars
(05:26):
to an anonymous buyer from Singapore just this summer. So
I'm curious, like, who would that person be spending seventy
eight thousand, almost seventy nine thousand dollars on champagne? Somebody
like me who like sweet wine. I guess it was
to Blaine at everybody it was was exposed here I
(05:46):
did not buy the champagne, so don't start any rumors
with that, Sarah, But I will say that there is
a point of interest here for people who don't like
champagne or wine. Even there was also beer found in
the shipwreck. Through the champagne, they found the world's oldest
drinkable beer, also a hundred sixty ft under the water well.
And the way they realized it was beer is kind
(06:07):
of interesting. They were bringing up one of the bottles
of the champagne when it exploded, because it's the pressure,
and instead of expelling something that looked like champagne, it
was this dark liquid and it was pretty clear that's
not champagne, it's beer. So five bottles total were recovered
and they're currently being studied by the Technical Research Center
(06:28):
of Finland, and just this June they reported back that
the first bottle that was open had unfortunately been contaminated
by saltwater, so not so lucky as the champagne. Unfortunately,
also the YE cells had been killed, and they were
hoping that maybe they could reculture those those Z cells
from old even though they were able to detect live
(06:50):
lactic acid bacteria, which that's kind of fascinating to me
that the specteria has been growing in this bottle for
centuries now. Yeah, so maybe not something that you'll want
to bid on right away, but it is interesting to
see what the beer was made of back in the day.
And there's still those other bottles left to study, so
it's hoped that perhaps some of them weren't contaminated by
(07:12):
saltwater and still have something semi drinkable, or at least
maybe some cells that they can start growing. So our
next entry takes us away from champagne and beer to
something a little bit harder. In nineteen o seven, Sir
Ernest Shackleton made a push for the South Pole with
his Endurance expedition. He got close about a hundred miles away,
(07:34):
but he decided to turn back and save his men,
unlike some other polar explorers that we won't mention here.
When Shackleton left though, in nineteen o nine, in March
of that year, winter ice was forming, so he got
out really fast and he had to leave some cases
of whiskey behind. The trip in general had kind of
a strange packing list. It had ponies, a motor car,
(07:55):
man pulled sledges, a cocaine forced march pills, but also
tons of booze, cases of whiskey, twelve cases of brandy,
and six cases of port. That's a lot to bring.
There were not that many guys going on this trip either,
so that unconsumed whiskey was found buried under two feet
(08:16):
of ice, and Shackleton's hut, again, like the Champagne's, is
going to prove to be a really great storage condition.
But researchers. Researchers have wondered why exactly Shackleton left it
behind besides that impending march ice. Some think that he
might have intended to return, and in which case it
would be nice to already have a little store of
whiskey waiting for you. But others think that it was
(08:39):
the secret stash of another expedition member, somebody who had
pocketed a few bottles or cases. I mean that seems
like it would be difficult to do, but had created
his own secret store of whiskey. Regardless, the store was
lost until two thousand six, nobody really remembered it was there.
That's when Explores local it to the bottles and later
(09:01):
came back with special drills to extract them. But it's
interesting the modern connection here because there is a company
that still manufactures this brand of whiskey, and it got
pretty interested. Yeah. Once the whiskey was identified as rare
old brand by McKinley and Company Whiskey, the company that
(09:21):
now owns McKinley and Company, White and Mackey was very
interested in obtaining samples and recreating the Scotch So in
January two thousand eleven, a case finally returned to Scotland
where it was analyzed before they had to return the bottles.
Everyone expected something really heavy and petty, fitting with the
taste of the times, but instead it was really light.
(09:43):
People were pleasantly surprised, and the chemical analysis they were
able to do prove that this was a pretty high
end whiskey, or at least it seems now they the
people who made it, clearly went to some trouble to
do so. The water was from lock nests and the
peat was from the Orkney Islands and that was used
to smoke the barley. So White and Mackie tried to
(10:04):
recreate the taste. They couldn't just wait years and years
and let it age. They had to create a blend.
But they're now selling Shackson's Whiskey for a pretty hefty sum,
not as much as those bottles of champagne, but still
a hundred and sixty dollars a bottle. So an interesting
resurrected alcohol. They're kind of akin to the beers we
(10:24):
talked about in the last podcast. Yeah, and actually, when
you think about some of the prices price tags we've
been throwing around, that's a pretty affordable sum with the
next entry on our list that we're going to move
back to one of those heftier price tags. And also
a historical event that I think everyone's probably heard of.
On November two thousand nine, a bottle of lower Brow
Lagger broke the world record for price paid for a
(10:46):
bottle of beer when it's sold for more than sixteen thousand,
six hundred and eighty dollars or ten thousand pounds. So
you have to think it must be a really good
bottle of beer, right, Actually not, yeah, not at all.
It just has a really good story behind it. That
beer was actually on the Hindenburg when the German airship
exploded as it landed in New Jersey in seven So
(11:08):
the Zeppelin as we know, was engulfed in flames killing
thirty eight people and injuring sixty and while cleaning up
the airfield later, a New Jersey firefighter named Leroy Smith
stumbled across a few items that survived the crash, intact
six bottles of lower Brow beer and a picture. All right,
So this firefighter buried the item so he could come
(11:29):
back and get them later, because at that point the
area had been sealed off by the authorities. Once he
retrieved them, he kept one for himself and gave the
other five to his colleagues, the sort of mementos of
this crash. Most of the others ended up being lost,
but one was donated to the Lower Brow company after
Smith's friend who had had it died, and Smith's bottle
(11:53):
and the picture passed on to his niece in nineteen
sixty six, and they were put on sale in two
thousand nine. By the years that Henry Aldrich and son.
So we have these two bottles kind of coming through
a plus the picture, which all managed to survive the crash,
and there was fierce competition for that bottle of beer
(12:13):
that was auctioned off, including telephone bitters, mostly from the
US before it's sold. And the picture, which is silver plated,
and there's the logo of the Zeppelin Airline Company sold
for almost as much. Prices paid for these items were
actually greater than those paid for items connected to Elvis,
Diana Ross and Paul McCartney, which were auctioned off on
the same day. Well, there's a survivor element to it
(12:35):
that it did manage to survive a crash like this.
But there's a catch. We didn't say it was good.
You can't actually drink the beer. Auctioneer Andrew Aldrich told
BBC News quote, it is probably quite putrid to taste,
So I don't know, maybe that would be a relief
(12:55):
if you spent that much money on alcohol if you
couldn't go ahead, didn't drink it. Well, you're obviously just
buying it for its historical value, but even for that,
I think it's it's probably worth it to a lot
of people. Our next entry, though, didn't involve just keeping
an expensive bottle on the shelf as some sort of
historical artifact. This amoutumous buyer actually consumed the drink we're
(13:19):
going to talk about next. Okay, so we'll just tell
you the story straight out and then give you a
little background on the alcohol involved. In two thousand five,
an anonymous guests anonymous to us, that is, at Pennyhill
Park Hotel in Bagshot, Surrey made headlines when he bought
a bottle of Dalmore sixty two whiskey for thirty two
thousand pounds or fifty eight thousand dollars and then proceeded
(13:41):
to drink it with a group of his friends like
right away to right, yeah, pretty much right there in
the hotel. And this wasn't just any fancy whiskey. Dal Moore,
which is a tiny Scottish distillery, created it by combining
casks of malt from eighteen sixty eight, eighteen seventy eight,
ninety six and nineteen third nine to make the single malt,
(14:02):
which made the youngest of the ingredients sixty two years old,
hence the name. When it was bottled, so it was
one of only twelve of these bottles ever made, and
each of the twelve bottles is named after different characters
and events in the distilleries history, so they kind of
added their own historical twist to it. The one that
was consumed at the hotel was called the maths And
(14:23):
after Alexander maths And who founded the distillery in eighteen
thirty nine. One bottle is still left at the distillery.
Others were sold to private collectors. But it's not like
you could just go up to a bar and order
one of these remaining bottles and put down your thirty
two pounds and walk away. According to an article in
(14:45):
the Telegraph, the hotel bought its bottle from dealers for
around thirty one thousand pounds quote, little expecting it to
be drunk. Another one of these bottles, for instance, has
sold an auction in two thousand two for twenty five thousand,
eight hundred and seventy seven pounds in fifty pence. So
it seems like there's a little range here for what
you'll pay for one of these bottles. But the price
(15:06):
paid by the hotel guests ended up being the world
record for a single mold. Nobody seemed too upset though,
about the fact that he drank it. An employee who
looks after the hotel's v I P guests got to
taste it. He was offered to taste, and he said
that the flavor was quote exquisite, and he said that
the buyer, the person who bought it quote has the
(15:26):
philosophy that there's no point in buying these fine whiskeys
and never drinking them. I can I can get behind
that idea. I can too. I kind of like that.
The hotel manager wouldn't identify the buyer, but he said
that he was a quote regular hotel guest and a
private collector of fine spirits. Clearly this The distilleries master
blender Richard Patterson was also quoted as saying that he
(15:47):
was happy the bottle had been open, shared and enjoyed.
And the buyer, you know, obviously doesn't have that whiskey anymore,
but he has the memories of drinking it, and he
still has the bottle to save. I don't know if
he did save it, but he would have that and
the presentation case. So maybe he saved those the souvenirs,
and maybe they'll be recreating this one too and issuing
some more, although I'm sure that wouldn't help those high
(16:09):
auction prices. So that concludes our tour of historic spirits
through the ages. We've started with the Chinese Neolithic grog
and gone all the way to this hotel guest who
was willing to spend quite a pretty tense on a
bottle of Scotch, and I like ending on that note.
(16:31):
I like ending on the the aged alcohol that could
be enjoyed. It's like almost a different way of appreciating history.
It certainly is. So if you have any more cool
alcohol fines you want to suggest to it, I mean,
there are so many out there. This was a very
edited list. You can email us where a history podcast
at how stuff works dot com. You can also find
(16:52):
us on Twitter at mist in History, and we are
on Facebook. And if you want to learn a little
bit more about spirits, I know, I for one am
no expert in the area, I have to admit, but
wine making in particular, we have an article on our
website called how Wine Making Works, and you can look
it up by visiting our homepage at www dot how
stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our
(17:17):
new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff
Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing
possibilities of tomorrow. The house Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived.
Download it today on iTunes.
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Deblane and Chocolate Barding and I'm fair And we
just did an episode on that was a sampling of
historic spirits, and we mostly focused on that episode on
(00:23):
ancient alcohols. So the truly old finds that were found,
as Sarah put it, gunk, the gunky alcohol, the gunky
alcohols that were found as residues some might say, on
old pottery, things that were found in two vessels. Yes,
so not really stuff that you can drink. And in
this portion of the episode, the second part, we're going
(00:47):
to focus on older alcohols that you could taste if
you came across one exactly, So things that are still drinkable,
maybe not necessarily delicious alcohol, not all alcohol ages well,
but something that does still have a liquid property to it.
Most of these are hundreds of years old or even
(01:07):
less than a hundred years old, whereas in the last
episode we were talking about alcohol residues that were thousands
of years old. But in this case researchers can still
study what's in the bottle chemically analyze it, but they
can also sample it we're not going to just talk
about old alcohol though. We're going to talk about some
finds that aren't really that old. After all. They're just
(01:30):
really interesting historically, they're connected to an important historical event
or an important historical figure, and we thought they were
worth including. Yeah, they're just cool stories in a lot
of cases. And this first one that we're going to
start with is a story that I think a lot
of people have probably heard about because it was so
recent it made the news. In July two thousand ten,
(01:52):
Swedish divers were exploring a wreck in the Baltic just
south of the Oland Islands between Sweden and Finland. At
two feet visibility was really bad. They couldn't see any
identifying info on the ship or locate the bell, but
they did find some bottles, most of them undamaged, and
they decided to take some up and try to date
(02:12):
the wreck that way. It turned out that they were
about one hundred and forty five bottles of champagne on
this ship, very likely the oldest champagne in the world,
and the dates in this really interested me, kind of
perplexed me a little. Almost every article we came across
puts the shipwreck at eighteen hundred to eighteen thirty, and
(02:34):
the alcohol obviously around that same period. I did find
one outlier, though, one date that is significantly before that,
and it kind of made some of the points that
the articles made, mentioning that perhaps this alcohol was a
shipment from Louis the sixteenth of France to the Imperial
Court of Russia, which if we're talking eight hundred eighteen thirty,
(02:55):
that doesn't make sense because Louis was dead. These dates
make it seem a little more natural. The Champagne included
bottles of of Cluko, which is one of the finest
brands of Champagne even today, and that brand was first
made in seventeen seventy two, but those bottles were laid
down for at least ten years, so using that day,
(03:16):
it seemed like the wreck couldn't be older than seventeen
eighty two, but couldn't be after eight or eighty nine
because the Champagne houses production was disrupted obviously during the
French Revolution, so a little discrepancy. They're not entirely sure
about when this wreck really happened, judging by the articles
written on it, and once they figure out more details
(03:38):
about the wreck, that may become more clear. So the
story they're still developing, But what about the champagne itself?
Does it really last that long? And apparently we find that, yes,
it does. I love the story. I love when you're
reading the stories about when they brought the champagne up
and it's like that. Some stories say that the divers
that when they brought it up the pressure of coming
(03:59):
to the surface the cork, or maybe they popped the
cork themselves, but they tasted it expecting to taste seawater
and found that no, in fact, it actually tasted good.
It tasted just like champagne, and an old and wine
expert who sampled the bottle described it as absolutely fabulous.
She even described looking at the samples in her fridge
after they weren't being consumed anymore and just thinking it
(04:21):
was absolutely miraculous that she had these. So it turns
out that the Baltic made a pretty great storage spot
for champagne for really long term storage. It's got a
constant cold temperature, but it's never going to freeze and
there's no light which can quickly degrade champagne. So even
though some of these champagne bottles may have been cracked
(04:42):
or the corks had corroded and maybe ruined the taste.
A lot of them were still intact, and they were
available in November for a taste when there were two
bottles were cracked open. A Bloomberg writer named Richard Vines
described it thus. He said that the jugular was quote
remarkably fresh, the fist had all almost gone, and it
was too sweet for today's palette. Yet it retained a
(05:03):
distinctive smell of orange and raisins, like a Christmas cake.
It might still be served as a dessert wine. Well,
So that description must have been pretty tantalizing to some people, apparently,
because two bottles of the champagne, one of two different kinds,
sold for fifty four thousand euros, which is the equivalent
to seventy eight thousand, nine hundred and seventy five dollars
(05:26):
to an anonymous buyer from Singapore just this summer. So
I'm curious, like, who would that person be spending seventy
eight thousand, almost seventy nine thousand dollars on champagne? Somebody
like me who like sweet wine. I guess it was
to Blaine at everybody it was was exposed here I
(05:46):
did not buy the champagne, so don't start any rumors
with that, Sarah, But I will say that there is
a point of interest here for people who don't like
champagne or wine. Even there was also beer found in
the shipwreck. Through the champagne, they found the world's oldest
drinkable beer, also a hundred sixty ft under the water well.
And the way they realized it was beer is kind
(06:07):
of interesting. They were bringing up one of the bottles
of the champagne when it exploded, because it's the pressure,
and instead of expelling something that looked like champagne, it
was this dark liquid and it was pretty clear that's
not champagne, it's beer. So five bottles total were recovered
and they're currently being studied by the Technical Research Center
(06:28):
of Finland, and just this June they reported back that
the first bottle that was open had unfortunately been contaminated
by saltwater, so not so lucky as the champagne. Unfortunately,
also the YE cells had been killed, and they were
hoping that maybe they could reculture those those Z cells
from old even though they were able to detect live
(06:50):
lactic acid bacteria, which that's kind of fascinating to me
that the specteria has been growing in this bottle for
centuries now. Yeah, so maybe not something that you'll want
to bid on right away, but it is interesting to
see what the beer was made of back in the day.
And there's still those other bottles left to study, so
it's hoped that perhaps some of them weren't contaminated by
(07:12):
saltwater and still have something semi drinkable, or at least
maybe some cells that they can start growing. So our
next entry takes us away from champagne and beer to
something a little bit harder. In nineteen o seven, Sir
Ernest Shackleton made a push for the South Pole with
his Endurance expedition. He got close about a hundred miles away,
(07:34):
but he decided to turn back and save his men,
unlike some other polar explorers that we won't mention here.
When Shackleton left though, in nineteen o nine, in March
of that year, winter ice was forming, so he got
out really fast and he had to leave some cases
of whiskey behind. The trip in general had kind of
a strange packing list. It had ponies, a motor car,
(07:55):
man pulled sledges, a cocaine forced march pills, but also
tons of booze, cases of whiskey, twelve cases of brandy,
and six cases of port. That's a lot to bring.
There were not that many guys going on this trip either,
so that unconsumed whiskey was found buried under two feet
(08:16):
of ice, and Shackleton's hut, again, like the Champagne's, is
going to prove to be a really great storage condition.
But researchers. Researchers have wondered why exactly Shackleton left it
behind besides that impending march ice. Some think that he
might have intended to return, and in which case it
would be nice to already have a little store of
whiskey waiting for you. But others think that it was
(08:39):
the secret stash of another expedition member, somebody who had
pocketed a few bottles or cases. I mean that seems
like it would be difficult to do, but had created
his own secret store of whiskey. Regardless, the store was
lost until two thousand six, nobody really remembered it was there.
That's when Explores local it to the bottles and later
(09:01):
came back with special drills to extract them. But it's
interesting the modern connection here because there is a company
that still manufactures this brand of whiskey, and it got
pretty interested. Yeah. Once the whiskey was identified as rare
old brand by McKinley and Company Whiskey, the company that
(09:21):
now owns McKinley and Company, White and Mackey was very
interested in obtaining samples and recreating the Scotch So in
January two thousand eleven, a case finally returned to Scotland
where it was analyzed before they had to return the bottles.
Everyone expected something really heavy and petty, fitting with the
taste of the times, but instead it was really light.
(09:43):
People were pleasantly surprised, and the chemical analysis they were
able to do prove that this was a pretty high
end whiskey, or at least it seems now they the
people who made it, clearly went to some trouble to
do so. The water was from lock nests and the
peat was from the Orkney Islands and that was used
to smoke the barley. So White and Mackie tried to
(10:04):
recreate the taste. They couldn't just wait years and years
and let it age. They had to create a blend.
But they're now selling Shackson's Whiskey for a pretty hefty sum,
not as much as those bottles of champagne, but still
a hundred and sixty dollars a bottle. So an interesting
resurrected alcohol. They're kind of akin to the beers we
(10:24):
talked about in the last podcast. Yeah, and actually, when
you think about some of the prices price tags we've
been throwing around, that's a pretty affordable sum with the
next entry on our list that we're going to move
back to one of those heftier price tags. And also
a historical event that I think everyone's probably heard of.
On November two thousand nine, a bottle of lower Brow
Lagger broke the world record for price paid for a
(10:46):
bottle of beer when it's sold for more than sixteen thousand,
six hundred and eighty dollars or ten thousand pounds. So
you have to think it must be a really good
bottle of beer, right, Actually not, yeah, not at all.
It just has a really good story behind it. That
beer was actually on the Hindenburg when the German airship
exploded as it landed in New Jersey in seven So
(11:08):
the Zeppelin as we know, was engulfed in flames killing
thirty eight people and injuring sixty and while cleaning up
the airfield later, a New Jersey firefighter named Leroy Smith
stumbled across a few items that survived the crash, intact
six bottles of lower Brow beer and a picture. All right,
So this firefighter buried the item so he could come
(11:29):
back and get them later, because at that point the
area had been sealed off by the authorities. Once he
retrieved them, he kept one for himself and gave the
other five to his colleagues, the sort of mementos of
this crash. Most of the others ended up being lost,
but one was donated to the Lower Brow company after
Smith's friend who had had it died, and Smith's bottle
(11:53):
and the picture passed on to his niece in nineteen
sixty six, and they were put on sale in two
thousand nine. By the years that Henry Aldrich and son.
So we have these two bottles kind of coming through
a plus the picture, which all managed to survive the crash,
and there was fierce competition for that bottle of beer
(12:13):
that was auctioned off, including telephone bitters, mostly from the
US before it's sold. And the picture, which is silver plated,
and there's the logo of the Zeppelin Airline Company sold
for almost as much. Prices paid for these items were
actually greater than those paid for items connected to Elvis,
Diana Ross and Paul McCartney, which were auctioned off on
the same day. Well, there's a survivor element to it
(12:35):
that it did manage to survive a crash like this.
But there's a catch. We didn't say it was good.
You can't actually drink the beer. Auctioneer Andrew Aldrich told
BBC News quote, it is probably quite putrid to taste,
So I don't know, maybe that would be a relief
(12:55):
if you spent that much money on alcohol if you
couldn't go ahead, didn't drink it. Well, you're obviously just
buying it for its historical value, but even for that,
I think it's it's probably worth it to a lot
of people. Our next entry, though, didn't involve just keeping
an expensive bottle on the shelf as some sort of
historical artifact. This amoutumous buyer actually consumed the drink we're
(13:19):
going to talk about next. Okay, so we'll just tell
you the story straight out and then give you a
little background on the alcohol involved. In two thousand five,
an anonymous guests anonymous to us, that is, at Pennyhill
Park Hotel in Bagshot, Surrey made headlines when he bought
a bottle of Dalmore sixty two whiskey for thirty two
thousand pounds or fifty eight thousand dollars and then proceeded
(13:41):
to drink it with a group of his friends like
right away to right, yeah, pretty much right there in
the hotel. And this wasn't just any fancy whiskey. Dal Moore,
which is a tiny Scottish distillery, created it by combining
casks of malt from eighteen sixty eight, eighteen seventy eight,
ninety six and nineteen third nine to make the single malt,
(14:02):
which made the youngest of the ingredients sixty two years old,
hence the name. When it was bottled, so it was
one of only twelve of these bottles ever made, and
each of the twelve bottles is named after different characters
and events in the distilleries history, so they kind of
added their own historical twist to it. The one that
was consumed at the hotel was called the maths And
(14:23):
after Alexander maths And who founded the distillery in eighteen
thirty nine. One bottle is still left at the distillery.
Others were sold to private collectors. But it's not like
you could just go up to a bar and order
one of these remaining bottles and put down your thirty
two pounds and walk away. According to an article in
(14:45):
the Telegraph, the hotel bought its bottle from dealers for
around thirty one thousand pounds quote, little expecting it to
be drunk. Another one of these bottles, for instance, has
sold an auction in two thousand two for twenty five thousand,
eight hundred and seventy seven pounds in fifty pence. So
it seems like there's a little range here for what
you'll pay for one of these bottles. But the price
(15:06):
paid by the hotel guests ended up being the world
record for a single mold. Nobody seemed too upset though,
about the fact that he drank it. An employee who
looks after the hotel's v I P guests got to
taste it. He was offered to taste, and he said
that the flavor was quote exquisite, and he said that
the buyer, the person who bought it quote has the
(15:26):
philosophy that there's no point in buying these fine whiskeys
and never drinking them. I can I can get behind
that idea. I can too. I kind of like that.
The hotel manager wouldn't identify the buyer, but he said
that he was a quote regular hotel guest and a
private collector of fine spirits. Clearly this The distilleries master
blender Richard Patterson was also quoted as saying that he
(15:47):
was happy the bottle had been open, shared and enjoyed.
And the buyer, you know, obviously doesn't have that whiskey anymore,
but he has the memories of drinking it, and he
still has the bottle to save. I don't know if
he did save it, but he would have that and
the presentation case. So maybe he saved those the souvenirs,
and maybe they'll be recreating this one too and issuing
some more, although I'm sure that wouldn't help those high
(16:09):
auction prices. So that concludes our tour of historic spirits
through the ages. We've started with the Chinese Neolithic grog
and gone all the way to this hotel guest who
was willing to spend quite a pretty tense on a
bottle of Scotch, and I like ending on that note.
(16:31):
I like ending on the the aged alcohol that could
be enjoyed. It's like almost a different way of appreciating history.
It certainly is. So if you have any more cool
alcohol fines you want to suggest to it, I mean,
there are so many out there. This was a very
edited list. You can email us where a history podcast
at how stuff works dot com. You can also find
(16:52):
us on Twitter at mist in History, and we are
on Facebook. And if you want to learn a little
bit more about spirits, I know, I for one am
no expert in the area, I have to admit, but
wine making in particular, we have an article on our
website called how Wine Making Works, and you can look
it up by visiting our homepage at www dot how
stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our
(17:17):
new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff
Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing
possibilities of tomorrow. The house Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived.
Download it today on iTunes.
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