There are aged spirits, and then there are aged spirits. You might think a 50-year-old Scotch has spent plenty of time waiting to be drunk — and you might be right. But that’s a relatively spry spirit compared with, say, 1862 Old Vatted Glenlivet, a bottle that’s spoken of in rarefied terms when it comes to old whisky.
Still, there are older bottles of spirits to be found out there and one of them just sold for a lot of money at auction. The Drinks Business reports that a bottle of Gautier Cognac 1762 sold for £118,580 (around $146,000) on May 28. That bottle — one of three bottles of the 1762 Cognac — set a new record for the oldest bottle of Cognac sold at auction.
The bottle was sold as part of an online auction at Sotheby’s titled “Distilled | Iconic Samaroli, Dalmore 62 and The World’s Oldest Cognac.” The bottle that was sold is one of three that remained in the hands of a family for generations. As the Sotheby’s writeup of the completed auction puts it:
This was the last and largest of these remaining bottles, known as “Grand Frère”, or the “Big Brother”; its little sister (“petite soeur”) is housed in the Gautier Museum, and its little brother (“petit frère”) was sold at auction in New York in 2014. The winning bidding – an Asian private collector – is also set to enjoy a bespoke experience at Maison Gautier, courtesy of the distillery.
“Distilled” was the auction house’s first online spirits auction of the year. Besides the record-setting amount for the bottle of Cognac, the auction also set a record for whisky made at the Dalmore Distillery. A pair of bottles of 62-year-old whisky sold for £266,200 (around $324,445) each. That’s an old bottle, for sure — but it’s not 1762 old.
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