Vintage Spirits
A burgeoning new market?
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Representing a window into retired production methods, forgotten cocktail trends, and lost distilleries, there’s something a little romantic about vintage spirits. But now they’re becoming highly collectable too. With new attention being paid to them by a growing number of bars, we ask do vintage liquids have the potential to be the next big thing?
In the world of spirits, time is a commodity. And while previously we’ve been used to measuring worth by the amount of time a liquid has aged, a shift in thinking is putting increased emphasis on when a bottle was first released. Vintage spirits are having a moment. Highly collectable not only for their scarcity and the challenge of tracking them down, but also for their ability to represent a frozen moment in time.
Unlike wines that develop, vintage spirits don’t age further in the bottle. Meaning, if they’ve been stored correctly, what you get when you open a bottle is a liquid time capsule. Vintage spirits allow imbibers to experience the same flavour someone ordering a drink decades ago, sometimes even centuries ago, would have done. Which for drinks geeks especially, is pretty darned special. And when they’re gone, they’re gone.
A historical flex
But with scarcity driving prices, they’re fast becoming a status symbol too. Some of the most expensive serves on the cocktail lists of a growing number of bars, are for this burgeoning sector. If you have £1200 to spare, why not sample some Boone’s Knoll 4 Year Old from 1900-04? The JW Steakhouse at London’s The Marriott Grosvenor Hotel has over 300 rare whiskies on its menu, including a number of pre-prohibition bourbons.
And though many vintage cocktail serves tend to run into the mid to low hundreds, Mayfair’s Donovan Bar tops them all. Salvatore’s Legacy, developed by leading mixologist Salvatore Calabrese, contains a 1788 Clos de Griffier Vieux Cognac, a 1770 Kummel liqueur, a Dubb orange liqueur from around 1860, and some Angostura bitters from around 1930. With a price reflecting its staggeringly old ingredients, it’s £5,500 a pop. So far he’s sold six.
What qualifies a spirit as vintage?
But finding the oldest possible liquid isn’t entirely what this trend is about. The interest from many collectors, and indeed bartenders that are now avidly collecting, is on acquiring liquids that are irreplicable.
Produced by long closed distilleries, using forgotten or retired methods, traditional machinery, higher quality or indeed, no longer available raw ingredients, many collectors are focused on liquids that represent a ‘golden age’ of production. Others look for transitional moments, from the birth of an age statement or expression, pre-recipe changes, to the era of a renowned distiller, or change of ownership of a particular brand.
Among the bottles available to buy direct from the Umbrella Project for example, there are camomile aperitifs, such as Bairo Camomilla (£100 for 1000ml) - highly popular in the 1950s but no longer produced. Or there’s Bunratty Potcheen Export from pre 1997, which is the only retail poitín available legally before that date.
High-end or highly accessible?
Though of course, the oldest, rarest liquids command the highest prices, there is a more accessible end of the spectrum. And it’s one that requires a little homework.
Vintage tequila is one of the fastest growing markets for collectors, and aside from the category’s growing popularity, it’s easy to see why. With this once cottage industry only rising to international prominence relatively recently, methods and materials for many smaller brands essentially remained the same for a long time; with agave harvested later, traditional brick ovens, and no added preservatives, colours or flavours.
But with increased scale and international brand owners acquiring producers, scale necessarily meant a focus on speed rather than tradition. As such many recipes changed, often without any public acknowledgement.
Seeking out these golden eras, even if they are fairly recent, has become a hot pursuit for fans searching for what they feel are bolder, more flavourful liquids, before mass mechanisation took a hold. In effect, it’s an Arts are Crafts movement for spirits, valuing the hand of man in a finished liquid, and prizing that above anything artificial or industrialised.
The future is dusty
Whether driven by the challenge of finding them, the scarcity of the consumption experience, the social currency they carry, or the purist’s pursuit of ‘better’ eras of liquid production, the race for so-called ‘dusty’ bottles is on. And with all of the conditions that make them prized only set to ramp up, demand is likely to follow. Is vintage the next big thing in spirits? We’d argue yes.
However, what may shift is what we define as vintage. As clean labelling forces a little – but not much – transparency on producers in certain categories (think tequila’s new clean labelling system), consumers will be better able to track pivotal shifts in liquid production and identify key areas to collect. Until then, the trend for collecting, if not consuming, is likely to remain the realm of a knowledgeable few.