So the BBC website reports that the world’s oldest surviving bottle of whisky is for sale.
Any whisky lover is going to be at least a little curious reading a headline like that; will it be drinkable? Will it be nice? Will the person who ends up buying it drink it? It’s a 150 years old. Whisky is supposed to improve with age (not universally true by any means, but an element of age does tend to help most whiskies, and so we want to know about this.
After clicking through to read the story with relish, it turns out that it is an old bottle of whisky rather than a bottle of old whisky. It was distilled by a company that closed its operations 150 years ago. The bottle is approximately that old. Whisky doesn’t improve in the bottle. Best case, it is in the same condition it was when it was bottled. I didn’t see any mention of how old the whisky was when it was bottled – how long it had matured since distillation.
With an expected selling price of around £10,000 (by no means the most expensive whisky ever), I imagine that what they aren’t telling us is that this would have been a pretty ordinary whisky in its day (and hence not likely to be special now!!). Its value comes from it being an antique and (as far as we know) unique, rather than from the quality of the whisky. Expensive whiskies often have their prices inflated through the ‘antique’ effect, but I imagine that whoever ends up buying this bottle isn’t really expecting to drink it – at least not expecting to enjoy drinking it!