Boozehound - Jason Wilson [86]
The guy from South Carolina didn’t know what he wanted. “Grey Goose and a squeeze of lemon is usually my fly-fishing drink,” he said. Then he halfheartedly told me he liked whiskey. Since I was about to visit Normandy the next day, I suggested maybe he should try a Calvados. “What is that?” he said. Pierre served him a small glass, and the guy winced: “Wow, that’s got some real vapors.”
“Don’t get those French 75s like Pierre made us last night,” said Joy “Those will put you under the bar.”
At which point, I knocked over the remainder of my €30 drink onto the bar. “Look,” Joy said, “I’ve made him nervous.” She whispered, “Are you staying at the hotel?”
“No,” I said. “Seven hundred euros a night is a little rich for me.”
“Seven hundred! You couldn’t get a very good room for that!”
Did people like this still exist in 2009? They clearly did. And some of them still tossed good money at spirits. In December of 2009, the landmark 427-year-old Parisian restaurant La Tour d’Argent cleaned out its cellar and auctioned off eighteen thousand bottles, including some extremely rare bottles of cognac. Three bottles, dating to 1788, sold respectively for $37,000, $31,000, and $27,300. The same week, at Christie’s in New York, a bottle of fifty-year-old Glennfiddich Scotch sold at auction for $38,000. Just over a week later, Bonhams in New York auctioned off the coveted Willard S. Folsom Collection of Old and Rare Whiskies. Among the 895 bottles on sale, more than fifty Scotches sold for at least $1,000 apiece—including a fifty-year-old Dalmore and a fifty-year-old Balvenie, each of which sold for over $7,000. This flurry of high bidding had raised a few questions for me. Such as: Isn’t there a financial crisis going on? Or: Why does the value of booze go up while the value of my portfolio remains in the toilet? Or: Have spirits become better investments than real estate, classic automobiles, and fine art?
I’d visited France a few months prior to those big sales, in September, and I was there to witness a different auction, the annual La Part des Anges auction in Cognac. At La Part des Anges, the bigwigs of the local spirits industry bid on very rare cognacs—the name means “The Angels’ Share,” the nickname for the amount of the cognac that evaporates in a barrel as it ages over decades. But before I headed to Cognac, I had a stopover in Paris and then planned to visit Guillaume Drouin’s Calvados distillery just before the September apple harvest was about to begin.
While in Paris, I stopped in at Au Verger de la Madeleine, a well-respected dealer in rare wines and spirits. I wanted to play some real Liquor Store Archaeology: I’d come looking for the coveted Chartreuse Tarragona, the version that had been made in Spain from 1903, when the Chartreuse monks were expelled from France, until 1989, when the monks closed the distillery. Olivier Madinier, one of Au Verger de la Madeleine’s managing partners, told me he had three bottles in his cellar. It was the middle of a Saturday afternoon, but he rolled down the gate and locked up the shop, then he and I descended into the dank, dusty cellar in a tiny elevator. We strolled past rows of thousand-euro bottles of Bordeaux, and then there were the bottles of Tarragona I’d heard so much about. Three of them. Each selling for eight hundred euros. Calling them “mythic,” Madinier said, “For connoisseurs, it’s more complex. It’s rare, but it’s good to drink. This is very important for us. Our clients are not only collectors. They like to drink the spirits.” I told him I wholeheartedly endorsed this philosophy. Madinier held one of the Tarragonas in his hands, and I prayed silently that maybe he might pop it open and give me a taste. I’m not sure whether or not he thought I might buy a bottle—I wish I could have, but eight hundred euros is too rich for my blood. So Madinier and I stood silently for an awkward moment. Then he put the bottle back, we crowded into the little elevator and went back upstairs, and he reopened the shop.
I showed Madinier my auction