A bottle of Scotch whiskey was sold to someone willing to pay $21,000 US/CDN. The bottle is 150 years old, far outliving anyone who may have bought the bottle and saved it as an investment. Recent public auctions have similarly yielded as much as $75,000 for this rare vintage whiskey.
The whiskey may taste much as it did when it was bottled, but that is merely conjecture. What you get for the money is a “2-part moulded olive green glass with 14 fluid ounces of whiskey. “Glenavon” is embossed on the sides of the glass and on top with ‘Special Liqueur’. A few decorative red stars appear above “Glenavon” in an outlined gold. “Special Liqueur Whisky” appears below and a small tag line at the bottom in black letters: “Bottled by the Distillers”.
The bottle can never be duplicated. The same might be said for its contents.
“Glenavon Special Liqueur Whisky” was bottled between 1851 and 1858, about the time Abraham Lincoln began to emerge as a leading political figure in America. The southern states were talking about succession from the Union and the abolitionists were making slavery the primary political agenda in the US. Elsewhere the French battled the Prussians and the British were colonizing India, Afghanistan and Canada, bringing whiskey with them on long campaigns.
I cannot imagine a circumstance whereby I would actually open this bottle. In fact, I could only imagine drinking it with a dear friend -- some 150 years ago. We would be into our second glass and talking about how the world was going to hell. Then we’d muse for a bit, and we’d get lost in our thoughts. We might even see the whiskey as part of a sacred tradition. We’d done our part by seeing the ritual through. We would feel refined by the taste and feel its presence coursing its way through our bodies. Emboldened we would share a promise to stand by something so precious as long as there was whiskey and a friend to drink it with. We would treasure each sip to the last.
