[HN Gopher] The oldest and most expensive rum?
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The oldest and most expensive rum?
Author : thunderbong
Score : 25 points
Date : 2023-07-26 06:02 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (harewood.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (harewood.org)
| vander_elst wrote:
| 7 to 10k a bottle doesn't seem so much to be honest, there are
| several wine producers that sell bottles for much more than that.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| $7 to $10k for a bottle is a lot of money, and anything more
| expensive than that is even more expensive than "a lot of
| money". However, this isn't 7-10k for a bottle of rum. It's
| 7-10k for a piece of history. As an antique, 7-10k not strange
| in any way, but as a bottle of rum, put in the same category as
| a bottle of wine, it'd be absolute nonsense.
| sva_ wrote:
| I think a Romanee-Conti Grand Cru will set you back around
| $20k.
|
| A 1945 vintage sold for something like $550k iirc.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| For some reason, rum doesn't have nearly as much snobbery
| around it compared to drinks like wine, whisky or even sake.
| Maybe it's because it was associated with sailors and the mass
| production when sugar plantations become common.
| kulahan wrote:
| Huh. I had no idea there was a lot of snobbery around sake,
| but I guess it's one of the few alcohols that aren't super
| commonly consumed in the US.
| motohagiography wrote:
| While not as old or perhaps storied, I can recommend the rum from
| St. Nicholas Abbey as a more affordable alternative, at probably
| a few hundred dollars for their most rare bottles - which they
| will engrave for you when you buy one. Barbados also had some
| exceptional cigars from the Royal Barbados factory in Bridgetown
| as well.
| raylad wrote:
| According to the auction listing, the 1780 dark rum actually sold
| for GBP 8,225 per bottle on 13 December 2013.
|
| https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-5757070
| submeta wrote:
| to save you some time, here is the summary of the article:
|
| The story begins over 300 years ago with the Lascelles family,
| who made their fortune in the West Indies through various
| businesses, including the production of rum. In 2011, Mark
| Lascelles and Andy Langshaw found mysterious, ancient-looking
| bottles in the cellars of Harewood House. These turned out to be
| bottles of rum, which were auctioned at Christie's in London in
| 2013 and 2014. The last 16 bottles sold for over PS100k, making
| Harewood Rum the oldest and most expensive rum in the world.
| cs702 wrote:
| These bottles with the aged rum inside them are best seen as rare
| antiquities with historical value.
|
| It's highly unlikely that anyone will ever drink that rum.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| If I were a multimillionaire spirits enthusiast, I'd absolutely
| drink it. Either someone will drink it one day or someone will
| accidentally break the bottle and seal and it will lose its
| contents. Might as well knowingly use it than unknowingly waste
| it.
| chomp wrote:
| And academic value, it's interesting to see the composition of
| food and beverage from decades (centuries?) past.
|
| However, I found an article where the purchasers drank the rum.
| It's natural curiosity.
| cs702 wrote:
| > the purchasers drank the rum
|
| People never cease to surprise me -- and prove me wrong!
| arcticbull wrote:
| lol, I'd drink it, if I found a couple more people to split the
| bottle cost with me. Might even grab two, one to drink and one
| to display. Thing is, I bet is not very good. If it were, I
| think it would be a lot more expensive.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| It wouldn't be anything special, anyways. Liquor ages in
| barrels. Once it's bottled, best case scenario it stays the
| same. The best you could hope for is learning "ah, so this is
| how Rum tasted 300 years ago"
| hotpotamus wrote:
| That's pretty impressive to think about though; there are few
| foods I can think of where it is possible to taste something
| as it would have been centuries ago. I believe there are also
| reports of people trying honey from Egyptian tombs, but I'm
| not aware of any other foods that are able to be preserved
| indefinitely.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I drank an unopened bottle of 120 year old scotch I found
| buried in sand at the beach. Planned to donate it to a museum
| but the cork fell out on its own so I tried it. Was pretty
| awful tasting TBH.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Liquor doesn't really age in the bottle. Learned that the
| hard way from a 100 year old bottle of 5 year whiskey a buddy
| found at an estate sale.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Liquor doesn 't really age in the bottle_
|
| I know this is the industry answer, but I don't buy it. For
| one, anyone who has stored liquor or wine vertically knows
| that the cork is constantly drawing out moisture. So at the
| very least, an older liquor in a corked bottle will be
| dehydrated compared to a younger one.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| That's more like (very slowly) spoiling. "Ageing" is
| usually used for when it changes the flavor in a
| desirable way.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _more like (very slowly) spoiling. "Ageing" is usually
| used for when it changes the flavor in a desirable way._
|
| I've tasted whiskies bottled in the 1940s and 50s. I
| rather liked whatever they were doing in comparison with
| fresher bottles. Over shorter intervals, sealed bottles
| of Chartreuse increase in complexity with time in a
| manner I find difficult to describe as anything but
| aging.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| It's just straight up wrong to suggest that liqueur
| doesn't change in glass and I don't think anyone in the
| industry would say otherwise. They are really talking
| about imparting the aging vessel on the spirit when they
| say aging. And glass doesn't impart anything.
|
| Whiskey breaks down over time even if store really well.
| Sometimes that results in a good outcome, sometimes not.
| It also could be you just like the recipes from back
| then.
|
| Chartreuse is famous for "aging" in glass. My hypothesis
| is it's just such a wild flavor profile muting it (which
| is what most often happens as spirits breakdown) makes
| for a more complex taste.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| If it were on the beach and exposed to the sun and wildly
| varying daily temperatures, I imagine that there would be
| some chemical reactions still going on in the bottle.
|
| I'm not a chemist or an alcohol connoisseur though, so I
| couldn't tell you what that would be, but to my reasoning
| it would explain why valuable alcohols are kept away from
| sunlight in temperature controlled rooms or at least
| underground where the temperatures don't change much.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| I was definitely using "age" as "chemically changing _in
| a desirable manner_ " when I wrote that. Liquor can
| definitely go bad in new and surprising ways stored
| poorly.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| It was likely buried in the sand and only just uncovered
| when I showed up - probably nearly ideal storage
| conditions of stable cool temp and no light
| etrautmann wrote:
| How did you come across this? Were you digging with the
| intention of finding something?
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Just walking on a beach, and ran across it randomly.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| If the cork fell out on its own, what possessed you to even
| try it? That bottle had been interacting with the environment
| for years, if not decades.
| bunga-bunga wrote:
| To be fair, all the interactions were sanitized with 40%
| alcohol.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| It fell out after several months of drying out, I think it
| was sealed until then. I made a mistake of storing it
| vertical when it sat horizontal for a century.
|
| It was drinkable, just not very good.
| pcurve wrote:
| People have.
|
| https://cocktailwonk.com/2018/09/drinking-the-harewood-house...
|
| Spoiler: it wasn't impressive.
|
| "The Harewood gives the impression of a lightly aged rum,
| perhaps a year or two. Letting it breathe a bit more, I was
| surprised to pick up cucumber - admittedly a most unusual rum
| flavor descriptor. With more time, I picked up spice notes, but
| not much vanilla. All in all, an extremely interesting rum,
| unlike anything I've ever encountered. But if had to choose one
| rum as my one desert island selection, it wouldn't be the
| Harewood, much as I enjoyed it."
| Orangeair wrote:
| I think this article is simply wrong about the "most expensive"
| part.
|
| > The last 16 bottles sold for a total well in excess of
| PS100,000 making Harewood Rum officially not only the oldest, but
| also the most expensive rum in the world.
|
| That only works out to 6k or 7k pounds sterling per bottle.
| Meanwhile:
|
| > Jamaican distiller J. Wray & Nephew is also recognised for
| producing one of the world's most expensive rums, a 17-year-old
| expression priced in the region of PS40,000 (US$52,000) and used
| to create the first Mai Tai cocktail in the 1940s.
|
| https://www.thespiritsbusiness.com/2019/05/wray-nephew-presi...
|
| And the other bottle they mention is more expensive than this as
| well.
| AceyMan wrote:
| Thank goodness the spirit was already bottled. I was a pretty
| serious single malt scotch fiend for a while and from tasting the
| very impressive collections of others I found that anything
| cooperage aged (wooden barrels) just doesn't get better beyond
| about thirty years or so.
|
| By year forty, each sip was akin to chewing on a toothpick.
|
| So, spirits can definitely be aged too much (at least with scotch
| whisky, ime).
| Me1000 wrote:
| I'm a connoisseur of American whiskeys (mostly bourbons) and
| it's just as true there. Most bourbons I've tasted hit their
| sweet spot around 15 years in a barrel, but once they start
| getting around 20 years, they're much less enjoyable. The
| overwhelming wood and tannins start masking what made the
| whiskey interesting and unique in the first place.
| lisper wrote:
| I got a chance to try a 100 year old port once. It tasted like
| a really good 20-year-old port which had been aged in the
| bottom of a Weber barbecue grill.
| jboy55 wrote:
| I tell this story often, when I was first out of college and at
| my first job, I was able to go on a business trip to a customer
| in a big city. A coworker joined me, he was around 30 years older
| than me, and had been at my company for about as long. It was
| looking like a long trip, our product wasn't performing well at
| the customer, so we were at the hotel bar and were looking at
| their extensive bar and he was explaining the ins and outs of
| expense reporting, "As long as you buy food, you can expense your
| drink", he said.
|
| The shelves behind the bar housed hundreds of different bottles
| of liquor. One set caught our attention, there was around 30
| bottles with the same label, but pretty obviously from different
| years. The oldest one's label was torn and visibly brown. The
| bartender wasn't around, so we consulted the price book. We found
| that these were a brand of Armagnac, and the bottles spanned the
| years from 1980 to around 1870 with prices that went from $20 to
| $450. $450 was an interesting number, it was also our hotel rate.
|
| We hatched a plan, we'd buy just one drink, and put it on our
| room bill. Then we'd 'add' an extra day to our stay when we did
| the expense. My peer was confident that he had known our expense
| person for 20 odd years, and was sure that this would pass. There
| was a problem, we had no idea what Armagnac tasted like, how
| would we know if what we were going to drinking was any good?
|
| The solution, we'd buy a 'decent' Armagnac ourselves, pay cash,
| then buy the expensive one. By this time the bartender asked us
| what we'd like, so we asked for a 'good' Armagnac. The bartender
| reached up and grabbed some VSOP bottle and poured us a glass
| each, then left. We were curious as the relative cost, and we saw
| in the book that the cost was $50 a glass. That was a shock, it
| was a lot to me, as much as I would spend in a weekend of
| drinking, but in our minds we got our drink and we had to drink
| it.
|
| It tasted incredible, so smooth, just one of the best drinks I
| had ever had. I could only imagine how much better the $450 one
| would taste. My coworker agreed, which meant a lot to me, given
| the age diff. However, the bartender came back, asked "how is the
| drink?". We said, "Its incredible, however, I know we asked for a
| good one, but the book says this is $50". The bartender was put
| back, "Sirs, I would never do that to you!" And went over and
| punched it into the til, it was $4.50. and to drive in the fact
| it was cheap, above the til it said that 'well' highballs were
| also $4.50.
|
| The very next sip I had, it might as well have been a dusty
| plastic bottled, no-name whiskey from the bottom shelf of a CVS.
| It was harsh, bitter, and tasted horrible. My colleague felt the
| same. We never did get the $450 drink.
| n1b0m wrote:
| This is why I buy cheap olive oil and transfer it to an
| expensive bottle
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