Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Deblane and Chocolate Barding and I'm fair And we just did an episode on that was a sampling of historic spirits, and we mostly focused on that episode on ancient alcohols. So the truly old finds that were found, as Sarah put it, gunk, the gunky alcohol, the gunky alcohols that were found as residues some might say, on old pottery, things that were found in two vessels. Yes, so not really stuff that you can drink. And in this portion of the episode, the second part, we're going to focus on older alcohols that you could taste if you came across one exactly, So things that are still drinkable, maybe not necessarily delicious alcohol, not all alcohol ages well, but something that does still have a liquid property to it. Most of these are hundreds of years old or even less than a hundred years old, whereas in the last episode we were talking about alcohol residues that were thousands of years old. But in this case researchers can still study what's in the bottle chemically analyze it, but they can also sample it we're not going to just talk about old alcohol though. We're going to talk about some finds that aren't really that old. After all. They're just really interesting historically, they're connected to an important historical event or an important historical figure, and we thought they were worth including. Yeah, they're just cool stories in a lot of cases. And this first one that we're going to start with is a story that I think a lot of people have probably heard about because it was so recent it made the news. In July two thousand ten, Swedish divers were exploring a wreck in the Baltic just south of the Oland Islands between Sweden and Finland. At two feet visibility was really bad. They couldn't see any identifying info on the ship or locate the bell, but they did find some bottles, most of them undamaged, and they decided to take some up and try to date the wreck that way. It turned out that they were about one hundred and forty five bottles of champagne on this ship, very likely the oldest champagne in the world, and the dates in this really interested me, kind of perplexed me a little. Almost every article we came across puts the shipwreck at eighteen hundred to eighteen thirty, and the alcohol obviously around that same period. I did find one outlier, though, one date that is significantly before that, and it kind of made some of the points that the articles made, mentioning that perhaps this alcohol was a shipment from Louis the sixteenth of France to the Imperial Court of Russia, which if we're talking eight hundred eighteen thirty, that doesn't make sense because Louis was dead. These dates make it seem a little more natural. The Champagne included bottles of of Cluko, which is one of the finest brands of Champagne even today, and that brand was first made in seventeen seventy two, but those bottles were laid down for at least ten years, so using that day, it seemed like the wreck couldn't be older than seventeen eighty two, but couldn't be after eight or eighty nine because the Champagne houses production was disrupted obviously during the French Revolution, so a little discrepancy. They're not entirely sure about when this wreck really happened, judging by the articles written on it, and once they figure out more details about the wreck, that may become more clear. So the story they're still developing, But what about the champagne itself? Does it really last that long? And apparently we find that, yes, it does. I love the story. I love when you're reading the stories about when they brought the champagne up and it's like that. Some stories say that the divers that when they brought it up the pressure of coming to the surface the cork, or maybe they popped the cork themselves, but they tasted it expecting to taste seawater and found that no, in fact, it actually tasted good. It tasted just like champagne, and an old and wine expert who sampled the bottle described it as absolutely fabulous. She even described looking at the samples in her fridge after they weren't being consumed anymore and just thinking it was absolutely miraculous that she had these. So it turns out that the Baltic made a pretty great storage spot for champagne for really long term storage. It's got a constant cold temperature, but it's never going to freeze and there's no light which can quickly degrade champagne. So even though some of these champagne bottles may have been cracked or the corks had corroded and maybe ruined the taste. A lot of them were still intact, and they were available in November for a taste when there were two bottles were cracked open. A Bloomberg writer named Richard Vines described it thus. He said that the jugular was quote remarkably fresh, the fist had all almost gone, and it was too sweet for today's palette. Yet it retained a distinctive smell of orange and raisins, like a Christmas cake. It might still be served as a dessert wine. Well, So that description must have been pretty tantalizing to some people, apparently, because two bottles of the champagne, one of two different kinds, sold for fifty four thousand euros, which is the equivalent to seventy eight thousand, nine hundred and seventy five dollars to an anonymous buyer from Singapore just this summer. So I'm curious, like, who would that person be spending seventy eight thousand, almost seventy nine thousand dollars on champagne? Somebody like me who like sweet wine. I guess it was to Blaine at everybody it was was exposed here I did not buy the champagne, so don't start any rumors with that, Sarah, But I will say that there is a point of interest here for people who don't like champagne or wine. Even there was also beer found in the shipwreck. Through the champagne, they found the world's oldest drinkable beer, also a hundred sixty ft under the water well. And the way they realized it was beer is kind of interesting. They were bringing up one of the bottles of the champagne when it exploded, because it's the pressure, and instead of expelling something that looked like champagne, it was this dark liquid and it was pretty clear that's not champagne, it's beer. So five bottles total were recovered and they're currently being studied by the Technical Research Center of Finland, and just this June they reported back that the first bottle that was open had unfortunately been contaminated by saltwater, so not so lucky as the champagne. Unfortunately, also the YE cells had been killed, and they were hoping that maybe they could reculture those those Z cells from old even though they were able to detect live lactic acid bacteria, which that's kind of fascinating to me that the specteria has been growing in this bottle for centuries now. Yeah, so maybe not something that you'll want to bid on right away, but it is interesting to see what the beer was made of back in the day. And there's still those other bottles left to study, so it's hoped that perhaps some of them weren't contaminated by saltwater and still have something semi drinkable, or at least maybe some cells that they can start growing. So our next entry takes us away from champagne and beer to something a little bit harder. In nineteen o seven, Sir Ernest Shackleton made a push for the South Pole with his Endurance expedition. He got close about a hundred miles away, but he decided to turn back and save his men, unlike some other polar explorers that we won't mention here. When Shackleton left though, in nineteen o nine, in March of that year, winter ice was forming, so he got out really fast and he had to leave some cases of whiskey behind. The trip in general had kind of a strange packing list. It had ponies, a motor car, man pulled sledges, a cocaine forced march pills, but also tons of booze, cases of whiskey, twelve cases of brandy, and six cases of port. That's a lot to bring. There were not that many guys going on this trip either, so that unconsumed whiskey was found buried under two feet of ice, and Shackleton's hut, again, like the Champagne's, is going to prove to be a really great storage condition. But researchers. Researchers have wondered why exactly Shackleton left it behind besides that impending march ice. Some think that he might have intended to return, and in which case it would be nice to already have a little store of whiskey waiting for you. But others think that it was the secret stash of another expedition member, somebody who had pocketed a few bottles or cases. I mean that seems like it would be difficult to do, but had created his own secret store of whiskey. Regardless, the store was lost until two thousand six, nobody really remembered it was there. That's when Explores local it to the bottles and later came back with special drills to extract them. But it's interesting the modern connection here because there is a company that still manufactures this brand of whiskey, and it got pretty interested. Yeah. Once the whiskey was identified as rare old brand by McKinley and Company Whiskey, the company that now owns McKinley and Company, White and Mackey was very interested in obtaining samples and recreating the Scotch So in January two thousand eleven, a case finally returned to Scotland where it was analyzed before they had to return the bottles. Everyone expected something really heavy and petty, fitting with the taste of the times, but instead it was really light. People were pleasantly surprised, and the chemical analysis they were able to do prove that this was a pretty high end whiskey, or at least it seems now they the people who made it, clearly went to some trouble to do so. The water was from lock nests and the peat was from the Orkney Islands and that was used to smoke the barley. So White and Mackie tried to recreate the taste. They couldn't just wait years and years and let it age. They had to create a blend. But they're now selling Shackson's Whiskey for a pretty hefty sum, not as much as those bottles of champagne, but still a hundred and sixty dollars a bottle. So an interesting resurrected alcohol. They're kind of akin to the beers we talked about in the last podcast. Yeah, and actually, when you think about some of the prices price tags we've been throwing around, that's a pretty affordable sum with the next entry on our list that we're going to move back to one of those heftier price tags. And also a historical event that I think everyone's probably heard of. On November two thousand nine, a bottle of lower Brow Lagger broke the world record for price paid for a bottle of beer when it's sold for more than sixteen thousand, six hundred and eighty dollars or ten thousand pounds. So you have to think it must be a really good bottle of beer, right, Actually not, yeah, not at all. It just has a really good story behind it. That beer was actually on the Hindenburg when the German airship exploded as it landed in New Jersey in seven So the Zeppelin as we know, was engulfed in flames killing thirty eight people and injuring sixty and while cleaning up the airfield later, a New Jersey firefighter named Leroy Smith stumbled across a few items that survived the crash, intact six bottles of lower Brow beer and a picture. All right, So this firefighter buried the item so he could come back and get them later, because at that point the area had been sealed off by the authorities. Once he retrieved them, he kept one for himself and gave the other five to his colleagues, the sort of mementos of this crash. Most of the others ended up being lost, but one was donated to the Lower Brow company after Smith's friend who had had it died, and Smith's bottle and the picture passed on to his niece in nineteen sixty six, and they were put on sale in two thousand nine. By the years that Henry Aldrich and son. So we have these two bottles kind of coming through a plus the picture, which all managed to survive the crash, and there was fierce competition for that bottle of beer that was auctioned off, including telephone bitters, mostly from the US before it's sold. And the picture, which is silver plated, and there's the logo of the Zeppelin Airline Company sold for almost as much. Prices paid for these items were actually greater than those paid for items connected to Elvis, Diana Ross and Paul McCartney, which were auctioned off on the same day. Well, there's a survivor element to it that it did manage to survive a crash like this. But there's a catch. We didn't say it was good. You can't actually drink the beer. Auctioneer Andrew Aldrich told BBC News quote, it is probably quite putrid to taste, So I don't know, maybe that would be a relief if you spent that much money on alcohol if you couldn't go ahead, didn't drink it. Well, you're obviously just buying it for its historical value, but even for that, I think it's it's probably worth it to a lot of people. Our next entry, though, didn't involve just keeping an expensive bottle on the shelf as some sort of historical artifact. This amoutumous buyer actually consumed the drink we're going to talk about next. Okay, so we'll just tell you the story straight out and then give you a little background on the alcohol involved. In two thousand five, an anonymous guests anonymous to us, that is, at Pennyhill Park Hotel in Bagshot, Surrey made headlines when he bought a bottle of Dalmore sixty two whiskey for thirty two thousand pounds or fifty eight thousand dollars and then proceeded to drink it with a group of his friends like right away to right, yeah, pretty much right there in the hotel. And this wasn't just any fancy whiskey. Dal Moore, which is a tiny Scottish distillery, created it by combining casks of malt from eighteen sixty eight, eighteen seventy eight, ninety six and nineteen third nine to make the single malt, which made the youngest of the ingredients sixty two years old, hence the name. When it was bottled, so it was one of only twelve of these bottles ever made, and each of the twelve bottles is named after different characters and events in the distilleries history, so they kind of added their own historical twist to it. The one that was consumed at the hotel was called the maths And after Alexander maths And who founded the distillery in eighteen thirty nine. One bottle is still left at the distillery. Others were sold to private collectors. But it's not like you could just go up to a bar and order one of these remaining bottles and put down your thirty two pounds and walk away. According to an article in the Telegraph, the hotel bought its bottle from dealers for around thirty one thousand pounds quote, little expecting it to be drunk. Another one of these bottles, for instance, has sold an auction in two thousand two for twenty five thousand, eight hundred and seventy seven pounds in fifty pence. So it seems like there's a little range here for what you'll pay for one of these bottles. But the price paid by the hotel guests ended up being the world record for a single mold. Nobody seemed too upset though, about the fact that he drank it. An employee who looks after the hotel's v I P guests got to taste it. He was offered to taste, and he said that the flavor was quote exquisite, and he said that the buyer, the person who bought it quote has the philosophy that there's no point in buying these fine whiskeys and never drinking them. I can I can get behind that idea. I can too. I kind of like that. The hotel manager wouldn't identify the buyer, but he said that he was a quote regular hotel guest and a private collector of fine spirits. Clearly this The distilleries master blender Richard Patterson was also quoted as saying that he was happy the bottle had been open, shared and enjoyed. And the buyer, you know, obviously doesn't have that whiskey anymore, but he has the memories of drinking it, and he still has the bottle to save. I don't know if he did save it, but he would have that and the presentation case. So maybe he saved those the souvenirs, and maybe they'll be recreating this one too and issuing some more, although I'm sure that wouldn't help those high auction prices. So that concludes our tour of historic spirits through the ages. We've started with the Chinese Neolithic grog and gone all the way to this hotel guest who was willing to spend quite a pretty tense on a bottle of Scotch, and I like ending on that note. I like ending on the the aged alcohol that could be enjoyed. It's like almost a different way of appreciating history. It certainly is. So if you have any more cool alcohol fines you want to suggest to it, I mean, there are so many out there. This was a very edited list. You can email us where a history podcast at how stuff works dot com. You can also find us on Twitter at mist in History, and we are on Facebook. And if you want to learn a little bit more about spirits, I know, I for one am no expert in the area, I have to admit, but wine making in particular, we have an article on our website called how Wine Making Works, and you can look it up by visiting our homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The house Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes.

Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Deblane and Chocolate Barding and I'm fair And we just did an episode on that was a sampling of historic spirits, and we mostly focused on that episode on ancient alcohols. So the truly old finds that were found, as Sarah put it, gunk, the gunky alcohol, the gunky alcohols that were found as residues some might say, on old pottery, things that were found in two vessels. Yes, so not really stuff that you can drink. And in this portion of the episode, the second part, we're going to focus on older alcohols that you could taste if you came across one exactly, So things that are still drinkable, maybe not necessarily delicious alcohol, not all alcohol ages well, but something that does still have a liquid property to it. Most of these are hundreds of years old or even less than a hundred years old, whereas in the last episode we were talking about alcohol residues that were thousands of years old. But in this case researchers can still study what's in the bottle chemically analyze it, but they can also sample it we're not going to just talk about old alcohol though. We're going to talk about some finds that aren't really that old. After all. They're just really interesting historically, they're connected to an important historical event or an important historical figure, and we thought they were worth including. Yeah, they're just cool stories in a lot of cases. And this first one that we're going to start with is a story that I think a lot of people have probably heard about because it was so recent it made the news. In July two thousand ten, Swedish divers were exploring a wreck in the Baltic just south of the Oland Islands between Sweden and Finland. At two feet visibility was really bad. They couldn't see any identifying info on the ship or locate the bell, but they did find some bottles, most of them undamaged, and they decided to take some up and try to date the wreck that way. It turned out that they were about one hundred and forty five bottles of champagne on this ship, very likely the oldest champagne in the world, and the dates in this really interested me, kind of perplexed me a little. Almost every article we came across puts the shipwreck at eighteen hundred to eighteen thirty, and the alcohol obviously around that same period. I did find one outlier, though, one date that is significantly before that, and it kind of made some of the points that the articles made, mentioning that perhaps this alcohol was a shipment from Louis the sixteenth of France to the Imperial Court of Russia, which if we're talking eight hundred eighteen thirty, that doesn't make sense because Louis was dead. These dates make it seem a little more natural. The Champagne included bottles of of Cluko, which is one of the finest brands of Champagne even today, and that brand was first made in seventeen seventy two, but those bottles were laid down for at least ten years, so using that day, it seemed like the wreck couldn't be older than seventeen eighty two, but couldn't be after eight or eighty nine because the Champagne houses production was disrupted obviously during the French Revolution, so a little discrepancy. They're not entirely sure about when this wreck really happened, judging by the articles written on it, and once they figure out more details about the wreck, that may become more clear. So the story they're still developing, But what about the champagne itself? Does it really last that long? And apparently we find that, yes, it does. I love the story. I love when you're reading the stories about when they brought the champagne up and it's like that. Some stories say that the divers that when they brought it up the pressure of coming to the surface the cork, or maybe they popped the cork themselves, but they tasted it expecting to taste seawater and found that no, in fact, it actually tasted good. It tasted just like champagne, and an old and wine expert who sampled the bottle described it as absolutely fabulous. She even described looking at the samples in her fridge after they weren't being consumed anymore and just thinking it was absolutely miraculous that she had these. So it turns out that the Baltic made a pretty great storage spot for champagne for really long term storage. It's got a constant cold temperature, but it's never going to freeze and there's no light which can quickly degrade champagne. So even though some of these champagne bottles may have been cracked or the corks had corroded and maybe ruined the taste. A lot of them were still intact, and they were available in November for a taste when there were two bottles were cracked open. A Bloomberg writer named Richard Vines described it thus. He said that the jugular was quote remarkably fresh, the fist had all almost gone, and it was too sweet for today's palette. Yet it retained a distinctive smell of orange and raisins, like a Christmas cake. It might still be served as a dessert wine. Well, So that description must have been pretty tantalizing to some people, apparently, because two bottles of the champagne, one of two different kinds, sold for fifty four thousand euros, which is the equivalent to seventy eight thousand, nine hundred and seventy five dollars to an anonymous buyer from Singapore just this summer. So I'm curious, like, who would that person be spending seventy eight thousand, almost seventy nine thousand dollars on champagne? Somebody like me who like sweet wine. I guess it was to Blaine at everybody it was was exposed here I did not buy the champagne, so don't start any rumors with that, Sarah, But I will say that there is a point of interest here for people who don't like champagne or wine. Even there was also beer found in the shipwreck. Through the champagne, they found the world's oldest drinkable beer, also a hundred sixty ft under the water well. And the way they realized it was beer is kind of interesting. They were bringing up one of the bottles of the champagne when it exploded, because it's the pressure, and instead of expelling something that looked like champagne, it was this dark liquid and it was pretty clear that's not champagne, it's beer. So five bottles total were recovered and they're currently being studied by the Technical Research Center of Finland, and just this June they reported back that the first bottle that was open had unfortunately been contaminated by saltwater, so not so lucky as the champagne. Unfortunately, also the YE cells had been killed, and they were hoping that maybe they could reculture those those Z cells from old even though they were able to detect live lactic acid bacteria, which that's kind of fascinating to me that the specteria has been growing in this bottle for centuries now. Yeah, so maybe not something that you'll want to bid on right away, but it is interesting to see what the beer was made of back in the day. And there's still those other bottles left to study, so it's hoped that perhaps some of them weren't contaminated by saltwater and still have something semi drinkable, or at least maybe some cells that they can start growing. So our next entry takes us away from champagne and beer to something a little bit harder. In nineteen o seven, Sir Ernest Shackleton made a push for the South Pole with his Endurance expedition. He got close about a hundred miles away, but he decided to turn back and save his men, unlike some other polar explorers that we won't mention here. When Shackleton left though, in nineteen o nine, in March of that year, winter ice was forming, so he got out really fast and he had to leave some cases of whiskey behind. The trip in general had kind of a strange packing list. It had ponies, a motor car, man pulled sledges, a cocaine forced march pills, but also tons of booze, cases of whiskey, twelve cases of brandy, and six cases of port. That's a lot to bring. There were not that many guys going on this trip either, so that unconsumed whiskey was found buried under two feet of ice, and Shackleton's hut, again, like the Champagne's, is going to prove to be a really great storage condition. But researchers. Researchers have wondered why exactly Shackleton left it behind besides that impending march ice. Some think that he might have intended to return, and in which case it would be nice to already have a little store of whiskey waiting for you. But others think that it was the secret stash of another expedition member, somebody who had pocketed a few bottles or cases. I mean that seems like it would be difficult to do, but had created his own secret store of whiskey. Regardless, the store was lost until two thousand six, nobody really remembered it was there. That's when Explores local it to the bottles and later came back with special drills to extract them. But it's interesting the modern connection here because there is a company that still manufactures this brand of whiskey, and it got pretty interested. Yeah. Once the whiskey was identified as rare old brand by McKinley and Company Whiskey, the company that now owns McKinley and Company, White and Mackey was very interested in obtaining samples and recreating the Scotch So in January two thousand eleven, a case finally returned to Scotland where it was analyzed before they had to return the bottles. Everyone expected something really heavy and petty, fitting with the taste of the times, but instead it was really light. People were pleasantly surprised, and the chemical analysis they were able to do prove that this was a pretty high end whiskey, or at least it seems now they the people who made it, clearly went to some trouble to do so. The water was from lock nests and the peat was from the Orkney Islands and that was used to smoke the barley. So White and Mackie tried to recreate the taste. They couldn't just wait years and years and let it age. They had to create a blend. But they're now selling Shackson's Whiskey for a pretty hefty sum, not as much as those bottles of champagne, but still a hundred and sixty dollars a bottle. So an interesting resurrected alcohol. They're kind of akin to the beers we talked about in the last podcast. Yeah, and actually, when you think about some of the prices price tags we've been throwing around, that's a pretty affordable sum with the next entry on our list that we're going to move back to one of those heftier price tags. And also a historical event that I think everyone's probably heard of. On November two thousand nine, a bottle of lower Brow Lagger broke the world record for price paid for a bottle of beer when it's sold for more than sixteen thousand, six hundred and eighty dollars or ten thousand pounds. So you have to think it must be a really good bottle of beer, right, Actually not, yeah, not at all. It just has a really good story behind it. That beer was actually on the Hindenburg when the German airship exploded as it landed in New Jersey in seven So the Zeppelin as we know, was engulfed in flames killing thirty eight people and injuring sixty and while cleaning up the airfield later, a New Jersey firefighter named Leroy Smith stumbled across a few items that survived the crash, intact six bottles of lower Brow beer and a picture. All right, So this firefighter buried the item so he could come back and get them later, because at that point the area had been sealed off by the authorities. Once he retrieved them, he kept one for himself and gave the other five to his colleagues, the sort of mementos of this crash. Most of the others ended up being lost, but one was donated to the Lower Brow company after Smith's friend who had had it died, and Smith's bottle and the picture passed on to his niece in nineteen sixty six, and they were put on sale in two thousand nine. By the years that Henry Aldrich and son. So we have these two bottles kind of coming through a plus the picture, which all managed to survive the crash, and there was fierce competition for that bottle of beer that was auctioned off, including telephone bitters, mostly from the US before it's sold. And the picture, which is silver plated, and there's the logo of the Zeppelin Airline Company sold for almost as much. Prices paid for these items were actually greater than those paid for items connected to Elvis, Diana Ross and Paul McCartney, which were auctioned off on the same day. Well, there's a survivor element to it that it did manage to survive a crash like this. But there's a catch. We didn't say it was good. You can't actually drink the beer. Auctioneer Andrew Aldrich told BBC News quote, it is probably quite putrid to taste, So I don't know, maybe that would be a relief if you spent that much money on alcohol if you couldn't go ahead, didn't drink it. Well, you're obviously just buying it for its historical value, but even for that, I think it's it's probably worth it to a lot of people. Our next entry, though, didn't involve just keeping an expensive bottle on the shelf as some sort of historical artifact. This amoutumous buyer actually consumed the drink we're going to talk about next. Okay, so we'll just tell you the story straight out and then give you a little background on the alcohol involved. In two thousand five, an anonymous guests anonymous to us, that is, at Pennyhill Park Hotel in Bagshot, Surrey made headlines when he bought a bottle of Dalmore sixty two whiskey for thirty two thousand pounds or fifty eight thousand dollars and then proceeded to drink it with a group of his friends like right away to right, yeah, pretty much right there in the hotel. And this wasn't just any fancy whiskey. Dal Moore, which is a tiny Scottish distillery, created it by combining casks of malt from eighteen sixty eight, eighteen seventy eight, ninety six and nineteen third nine to make the single malt, which made the youngest of the ingredients sixty two years old, hence the name. When it was bottled, so it was one of only twelve of these bottles ever made, and each of the twelve bottles is named after different characters and events in the distilleries history, so they kind of added their own historical twist to it. The one that was consumed at the hotel was called the maths And after Alexander maths And who founded the distillery in eighteen thirty nine. One bottle is still left at the distillery. Others were sold to private collectors. But it's not like you could just go up to a bar and order one of these remaining bottles and put down your thirty two pounds and walk away. According to an article in the Telegraph, the hotel bought its bottle from dealers for around thirty one thousand pounds quote, little expecting it to be drunk. Another one of these bottles, for instance, has sold an auction in two thousand two for twenty five thousand, eight hundred and seventy seven pounds in fifty pence. So it seems like there's a little range here for what you'll pay for one of these bottles. But the price paid by the hotel guests ended up being the world record for a single mold. Nobody seemed too upset though, about the fact that he drank it. An employee who looks after the hotel's v I P guests got to taste it. He was offered to taste, and he said that the flavor was quote exquisite, and he said that the buyer, the person who bought it quote has the philosophy that there's no point in buying these fine whiskeys and never drinking them. I can I can get behind that idea. I can too. I kind of like that. The hotel manager wouldn't identify the buyer, but he said that he was a quote regular hotel guest and a private collector of fine spirits. Clearly this The distilleries master blender Richard Patterson was also quoted as saying that he was happy the bottle had been open, shared and enjoyed. And the buyer, you know, obviously doesn't have that whiskey anymore, but he has the memories of drinking it, and he still has the bottle to save. I don't know if he did save it, but he would have that and the presentation case. So maybe he saved those the souvenirs, and maybe they'll be recreating this one too and issuing some more, although I'm sure that wouldn't help those high auction prices. So that concludes our tour of historic spirits through the ages. We've started with the Chinese Neolithic grog and gone all the way to this hotel guest who was willing to spend quite a pretty tense on a bottle of Scotch, and I like ending on that note. I like ending on the the aged alcohol that could be enjoyed. It's like almost a different way of appreciating history. It certainly is. So if you have any more cool alcohol fines you want to suggest to it, I mean, there are so many out there. This was a very edited list. You can email us where a history podcast at how stuff works dot com. You can also find us on Twitter at mist in History, and we are on Facebook. And if you want to learn a little bit more about spirits, I know, I for one am no expert in the area, I have to admit, but wine making in particular, we have an article on our website called how Wine Making Works, and you can look it up by visiting our homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The house Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes.