Take your best shot.
A bottle of what’s believed to be the oldest known whiskey in existence will hit the auction block this summer — where it’s expected to sell for an intoxicating price.
The Old Ingledew Whiskey — which dates back to Revolutionary times — is anticipated to fetch somewhere between $20,000-$40,000, according to to Skinner, which is facilitating the June auction.
The rare bourbon was was likely produced between 1762-1802, based on Carbon 14 dating conducted in conjunction with experts from the University of Georgia.
It wasn’t bottled until several decades later, in the 1860s, at the general store Evans & Ragland in La Grange, Georgia.
Wall Street financier John Pierpont Morgan — whose banking firm ultimately became J.P. Morgan and Co. — is believed to have purchased the bottle during one of his frequent trips to the Peach State.
“It is a fascinating story,” Joseph Hyman, a fine spirits specialist at Skinner, told Barrons.
“The whiskey was not bottled at a distillery destroyed in the war, it is actually bottled by a general store, which is the same way the Scotish whisky Johnnie Walker started.”
Morgan’s son, Jack Morgan, gifted the bottle to judge and politician James Byrnes and two sister bottles to Franklin D. Roosevelt — a distant cousin — and Harry S. Truman, for Christmas, circa 1942-44, Hyman said.
Byrnes, who served in Congress, on the US Supreme Court and as governor of South Carolina, reportedly re-gifted the spirit to his friend and drinking buddy Francis Drake in the 1950s.
Drake and his descendants — who were strict Scotch drinkers — saved the brew for three generations.
It will be offered in an online auction from June 22-30.