Old Ingledew Whiskey: The oldest Whiskey bottle in the world goes up for auction in June

The Old Ingledew Whiskey, the World’s oldest whiskey bottle is slated to be auctioned by Boston-based Skinner Auctions in June.

The auction world is teeming with casks and rare bottles of aged spirits. However, there aren’t many that can compare to a bottle of Old Ingledew Whiskey, which is set to go up for grabs this summer.

This bottle of American whiskey is believed to be the world’s oldest. According to a recent laboratory test, the Old Ingledew, which was previously thought to date back to the 1850s, was probably bottled between 1763 and 1803.

Spirit specialist with the auction house, Joseph Hyman teamed up with the scientists from the University of Georgia and University of Glasgow to analyze the spirit earlier this year, according to Skinner Auctions.

“The age was a shocking surprise, albeit a pleasant one, for both myself and the scientist,” Hyman told Food and Wine.

A sample of the liquid was taken and tested using Carbon-14 dating, which analyzes the amount of radiocarbon in an object. The test showed that there was an 81.1 percent probability that the whisky was actually bottled between 1763 and 1803.

This puts it in the historical context of the Revolutionary War and Whiskey Rebellion. Bottled by Grocers and Commission Merchants of LaGrange, Georgia, and Evans & Ragland, the Old Ingledew once belonged to Wall Street financier John Pierpont Morgan.

Morgan obtained it during a business trip to the state, according to Barron’s. “It is a fascinating story,” Hyman told the publication.

“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 Scottish whisky Johnnie Walker started.”

Morgan’s son Jack gave the bottle to future US Supreme Court justice and South Carolina governor James Byrnes in 1940. The other two bottles of whiskey were gifted to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, however, this is the only one that survived.

The bottle Old Ingledew Whiskey will go up for sale during Skinner’s online-only spirits auction in June. It is expected to sell for somewhere between $20,000 and $40,000, but with the whiskey’s interesting history, it is likely to end up selling for more.