Ep. 107 - World's Oldest Whisky Found! And the World of Whisky Auctions

Transcript

Drew Hannush (00:00.426)
Welcome to Whiskey Lord, the interviews. I'm your host, Drew Hanisch, the bestselling author of Whiskey Lord's travel guide to experiencing Irish whiskey and experiencing Kentucky bourbon and the upcoming Lost History of Tennessee Whiskey, which is available for pre-order in the US for customers at whisky-lord.com. And today it is time to dive into the world of whiskey auctions. And my guest is Joe Wilson. He is the head curator and spirit specialist at Whiskey Auctioneer. And...

The reason that I got in touch with Joe is because recently we got the news that there was a discovery made at Blair Castle in Perthshire in the Highlands of some bottled whiskey that is nearly 200 years old. And as you'll probably recall from some of my previous episodes, we've talked about these older whiskies and tried to figure out, you know, how they determine the legitimacy of these whiskies.

uh, the provenance and, and all of that, the term and provenance and, and the rest. So I want to jump in and talk about this cause we have whiskies now that are going up for auction and, um, these are said to be the oldest scotch whiskies known to, uh, to anyone at this point. So, uh, we're going to find out from Joe, how auctions work, how people buy and sell online.

and also how to determine what the starting values are for these whiskies. And we're going to dive into this particular historic find at Blair Castle, which is absolutely fascinating. So Joe, welcome to the show!

Joe Wilson (01:37.364)
Hello, thank you for having me.

Drew Hannush (01:40.918)
Oh, it's great to have you here. And I wanted to kind of first jump in and find out how somebody gets into this world of whiskey auctions. So kind of give us a little feel for your background.

Joe Wilson (01:55.72)
Well the company itself was founded in 2013 by Ian McClune, who's still my boss today. And he had a big background in whisky himself. He worked for Rylemall whiskies, which is a big retailer here in Scotland.

and he developed a kind of passion for old and rare whiskey and wanted to create better opportunities for people to be able to acquire these bottles, to share these bottles and ultimately have access not just within Scotland and Europe where the highest concentration of these were but to a global audience and I joined the company around four years later in 2017 and my background was actually in the kind of museum industry. I'd worked on a few different projects

at a few different galleries and museums with a focus on what we describe as interpretation of objects and helping people to see why things are important both historically and in the case of art, sometimes financially. I saw an opportunity to translate that into the whisky world and auctions are an incredible place for people to learn about whisky, to discover new whisky and my focus within the company is very much.

on telling these stories, communicating these histories to people and getting people to understand why a bottle of whisky not just has a financial value but where that financial value comes from in terms of the history of it, the provenance of it and why certain things are worth more than others, why certain things are more special to people than others and of course it can be entirely subjective in many cases as well but that's all part of the fun at the end of the day.

Drew Hannush (03:38.462)
It seems like it'd be really difficult if you didn't have a background knowledge of whiskey history to be able to really understand these bottles when they arrive. Because I saw a picture online of what looked like different odd shaped bottles. They were all, you know, basically brown bottles with sort of messy looking corks in the top of them. It's not what we.

Think of today when we think of a whiskey bottle with a brand on it and all the bottles look the same and having kind of that knowledge of history and the development of bottles and knowing that those were probably hand blown bottles which might add to the legitimacy. You know, the feeling is it'd be really hard for somebody who doesn't know a lot of this history to be able to.

be able to price these things out or understand their backgrounds.

Joe Wilson (04:41.224)
Yeah, I think that's an important part of our role as the auction house is to give people the tools to educate themselves as to what they're potentially bidding on and buying. It's a difficult one because you would struggle, I think, in a lot of cases to come into a company like Whiskey Auctioneer with all the prior knowledge that you need because the world of old and rare whisky has a prohibitive price point, I think, for some people.

being able to taste a lot of these whiskeys or own them or even seen them in a lot of cases is difficult for people to do and then I'm obviously incredibly fortunate in my job in the company that I get to see 10,000 different bottles of whisky every month so there's a lot of learning on the job and we do a lot of training and a lot of education in house with the staff and bring everybody up to speed and I think again that's one of the true joys of working for a company like this is that if you have an interest in whisky it's

know it's a joy to come to work every day and learn and sometimes we even get to taste it as well which is a bonus.

Drew Hannush (05:48.502)
Yes, absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about how the auctions take place because in my mind, I guess this is the Hollywood kind of version of things. You see this beautiful estate building you're in that people are putting up paddles and the auctioneer is throwing out values and calling on whoever won.

At this particular point though, with the age of the internet, a lot of that has changed. So talk about Whiskey Auctioneer and how you do your whiskies. How can people bid and that sort of thing.

Joe Wilson (06:31.78)
Yeah, so it's a very different process to what we would term as the old school kind of bricks and mortar auction house where everybody's in a room or on the phone.

bottles come up sequentially whereas in our auctions they run for a set period of 10 days. Our whiskey auction always starts on the last Friday of a month and it will run for 10 days ending on the Monday evening. Depending on where you are in the world that can be a different time. If you are in the US like you are it's fairly easy, you don't have to stay up too late whereas if you're in Japan or the Far East for example it can be a very early morning or a lot of coffee as you sit up to keep an eye on your bottles. But that is it.

Drew Hannush (07:09.75)
Heh heh.

Joe Wilson (07:11.37)
that is part of the beauty of it is that it becomes so accessible to people and because the lots are there 24 hours a day you can drop in throughout the course of the week and bid kind of as and when you please so there's no with the exception of the deadline at the end there's no there's no barrier to participation in that respect and then you know the bottles are shipped all over the world we have buyers in 74 different countries at the moment we get around 150,000 bids per month.

all auctions, if you're familiar with using eBay or something like that, the majority of these bids will come probably on the last date like everything else, but you know that is the advantage of it is that people have time to you know we try to treat the auction first and foremost as a sale but also as like an exhibition of whisky so we put a lot of effort into communicating the stories behind each bottle about the distilleries, information specifically about each release

Drew Hannush (07:49.298)
Mmm.

Joe Wilson (08:11.17)
therefore in that 10 day span for people to really kind of dig in and find out what they're interested in and maybe not just have a selective lens when they approach the auction and say I'm just interested in Macallan or I'm just interested in Buffalo Dress. There is time for people to explore branches of their own interest tree so to speak and discover new things so yeah I think it's a really...

engaging or I hope that it's an engaging process for people and certainly with respect to these Blair Castle whiskeys that are coming up just now we're doing all that we can to create as much kind of engaging content around this as possible because it is a truly once probably a once in a lifetime opportunity to really explore bottles of this kind.

Drew Hannush (08:59.954)
Yeah, I mean, it's a true education because we're talking about a time period where whiskey was made in a completely different way. The industrial revolution had finally reached the whiskey industry right around that time. So we see a big shift. You must have a really, to be able to handle that many different types of whiskey, how many whiskies would you say that you have?

per month in an auction.

Joe Wilson (09:31.22)
So the average count is between probably 8 and 10,000 bottles per month.

that's just whiskey. We also have a rum auction platform so there's around a thousand bottles of rum and between kind of 500 and a thousand bottles of wine every month on the wine auction as well. So you know it's a multi-disciplinary and you know that the auctions don't all run at the same time so you know there's always something going on there's always bottles passing through and it's you kind of have to you have to remind yourself sometimes how fortunate you are to be surrounded

Drew Hannush (09:39.47)
W- Ha ha.

Joe Wilson (10:08.162)
any incredibly special, rare, in some cases expensive bottles of whiskey because you know like anything in life if you do it eight hours a day every day for nearly six years as I've done it now you can get not so much jaded but maybe it becomes normal and it isn't really normal for the majority of people who are interested in whiskey and you have to remind yourself that you know you are incredibly privileged and it's a very special

Drew Hannush (10:27.374)
Hehehe

Joe Wilson (10:38.344)
in this kind of thing.

Drew Hannush (10:41.102)
It's funny because my mother said a long time ago, if you want to feel rich, just add a couple zeros to the money in your pocket, in your mind, and you will hit this different level. So you're kind of probably having to leave the auction house and take a couple zeros off to be able to deal in today's regular day-to-day living versus what you're dealing with in terms of sales on whiskey.

Joe Wilson (10:53.114)
Yeah.

Joe Wilson (11:10.692)
Yeah, I mean, the most of the stuff that we sell is out of my budget, you know, for example. So I'm getting better at it now, but because you see pretty much everything that is released at some point, you can create quite a lengthy shopping list in your head of things that you want to buy and try. So I've...

Drew Hannush (11:31.595)
Yeah.

Joe Wilson (11:33.628)
I've gotten better at teaching myself that it's maybe just better to look these up in bars and just try like the odd dram rather than try and buy as many bottles as you can because you know it takes up a lot of space and it takes up a lot of your disposable income.

Drew Hannush (11:45.966)
Hehehe

Drew Hannush (11:52.718)
I can't imagine. I'm thinking though in terms of writing profiles for 10,000 bottles of whiskey every month, do you kind of stay with certain brands that you're familiar with and then maybe bring in as people are presenting bottles to you to put up online for auction? Do you?

stay with certain tried and trues and then just slowly add other ones in as you get more knowledge or how do you handle that?

Joe Wilson (12:26.024)
Yeah, it's basically exactly that. We just build up the bank of knowledge over time and then...

I might read something and I've read it every month for four years and I'm sick of it, I might decide to rewrite it every now and again. So we get, with an auction of 10,000 bottles every month, there are always going to be bottles that you just see all the time. So we see a lot of Macallan, we see a lot of Beaumont, we see a lot of like Papi Van Winkle Bourbon, for example. And there's a lot that you can say about these and we have these lot descriptions

kind of in place and we'll build them up over time and the beauty of that is that as you flesh out that kind of core business in the middle there is time to spend on more rare and unusual things so you know every month here even for someone like me who's been working at this for six years I'm always learning which is which is you know a treat in itself so.

Drew Hannush (13:26.206)
Yeah. How much of this when a client brings you bottles is setting expectations for them? Because I'm assuming that some people come to you thinking their whiskey is worth a whole lot more than probably you might put a value on it.

Joe Wilson (13:42.02)
Yeah, I mean, there's different completely, there's a broad spectrum, I would say, of people selling from people who know what they have, who are, they can either be reasonable or they can be slightly greedy in some aspects. You never know where the bottles come from. They might have bought it somewhere else and they're looking to maybe turn a profit on it, or they may have been misadvised by someone as to the value of something. So there is a lot of setting expectations.

you can also have somebody and these are the these are the really nice stories that happen every now and again where if somebody's just found something in an attic you know similar to the Blair Castle thing but not never quite on that scale I think but where we are in Perth the Edrington head offices used to be around here so there's a lot of former kind of Macallan and Highland Park staff who had relatives that worked for Edrington and every now and again they'll find an old Macallan anniversary malt in the attic and because it's

bottle or their grandparents bottle it they have no idea how much it's worth and then you have these nice moments where you know somebody's now able to get a new kitchen or take the family on holiday in a couple of weeks time so

Drew Hannush (14:54.25)
Yeah, I had a great experience when I went out to California and there was a pre-prohibition whiskey find. And when the people that owned the property thought that the whiskey was worthless, they didn't, they're like, there's these old dusty bottles of whiskey back in the vaults and we're probably just going to toss these things out. And then decided to get in touch with somebody local who said, ah, you know, 50 grand, I'll take it all off of your hands.

Uh, Christie's auction house came out and flew out to evaluate things and set prices at maybe $5,000 for a box with, uh, six quarts of this a hundred year old whiskey in it, you know, five grand, they said probably when they set the price and they ended up selling for 20 grand or 30 grand. And here, you know, they were about to sell tons and tons of, of whiskey for

$50,000 if they'd gone through on that original deal. So it's interesting to see, again, how people could get a figure in their mind or be led in a particular direction when in reality they could be worth a lot more or a lot less than they think they are.

Joe Wilson (16:11.089)
Yeah, and I think it's...

It's a good example of why auction platforms like ours are so valuable to people. You know, when you talk about an auction house like, you know, Sotheby's or Bonhams or Christie's or, you know, it's not these are not dedicated whiskey auctions. They have huge departments all over the world that, you know, primarily deal in watches and artwork and cars and things like that. And they've always historically had kind of fine wine departments. But for a lot of and in many cases still are the whiskey is kind of just a.

subset of that, whereas we have a dedicated whisky auction, we have dedicated staff who are always being trained and are pretty knowledgeable about the whisky and if you bring your whisky to us, you stand the best chance of having it assessed properly both from everything through authenticity to value to how we handle it in terms of presenting the auction to people in terms of bringing an engaged audience for people. And I think that is one of the great

is that it brings that kind of specialist service to people and it makes it accessible to as many people as possible as well.

Drew Hannush (17:20.658)
One of the interesting things about that particular auction was that they had a lot of unopened bottles but the whiskey was below the shoulder or sometimes the labels were not in great condition. Is that something that causes you to turn whiskies away or do you just set a different expectation and price on those?

Joe Wilson (17:43.513)
Um...

It would really depend. There'd have to be an assessment of the condition of the whiskey. And, you know, with the prohibition pints that you're referring to, it's quite common for the fill level to be in that kind of shoulder region. And it can be anything from, you know, that's just how full they were at the time to there might be issues with the closure on the bottle that is allowing some evaporation, it could be leaking and, you know, if a bottle is leaking, then we probably won't take the risk.

auctioning that to someone because we have such a global audience then if you try and ship a bottle that's leaking halfway across the planet chances are it's gonna leak again and then you're gonna have an unhappy buyer at the other end so you know there are instances where It may be fine, but you have to make a judgment call as the auction house as to whether the condition of the whiskey is we should sell something with the At least the pretense that it might be opened and drunk

Drew Hannush (18:23.818)
Yeah, yeah.

Joe Wilson (18:44.154)
pound bottle you know so we can't sell something that's all you know oxidized and cloudy and bits of cork floating it and things like that so you know there are times where as much as we don't want to turn people and their whiskey away there are instances where you have to you have to kind of draw pull the drawbridge up for some bottles unfortunately.

Drew Hannush (19:03.166)
Yeah, do you send people out in the field to go look at these or do they have to ship them in to get them looked at?

Joe Wilson (19:11.784)
For the most part you need to bring the bottle to us, you can bring it in person or you can ship it to us. In very rare circumstances we would go out and do an inspection primarily for very large collections so we auctioned a single collection mostly of Macallan that came from Parma in Italy and the guy was quite understandably quite nervous about shipping 2,000 bottles to us if there was a chance and there always is with Macallan that there might be some counterfeits in there and things.

Drew Hannush (19:36.398)
Hehehe

Joe Wilson (19:41.458)
so I flew out there and inspected them all and there was only one bottle that we rejected for authenticity concerns which was really pleasing, you know, in that respect and we got a trip to Italy out of it which was quite nice as well. The guy gave me a wedge of parmesan as a thank you, I had to leave three t-shirts because I couldn't get it in my suitcase to fly it home.

Drew Hannush (19:57.122)
Nice.

Drew Hannush (20:07.61)
Oh man. Yeah getting stuff shipped around, I mean the logistics of dealing with alcohol regulations in every country and getting stuff shipped in can be difficult. I know the US is pretty strict on it. How would a US person be able to ship? Are they shipping through your program rather than shipping on their own, just putting it in UPS and sending it along?

Joe Wilson (20:36.144)
Yeah, so we will organise the shipping too.

the buyer as long as we're able to ship to, in America's instance, to the state in question that the buyer is in. So it changes quite frequently and if you are bidding from America I think the best thing to do is get in touch with our customer service department and they'll let you know which states that we can and can't ship to. But I think at the moment we can do most of them I think. I don't know off the top of my head which ones we can and can't but certainly it's improved over the years and the auction is far more accessible

in the US than it probably has been previously. Certainly easier than places like Canada, for example, which is a nightmare.

Drew Hannush (21:19.674)
That's the first time I've heard the US not be called the nightmare over somebody else. Of the 10,000 bottles or so that you put on auction every month, what would the percentage probably be of whiskeys that are probably over 50 years old, say, that you usually have online? Is this something that's fairly rare?

Joe Wilson (21:23.727)
Ahhhh

Drew Hannush (21:45.878)
Do you seem to have a pretty steady amount of those coming in?

Joe Wilson (21:49.8)
So, bottles bottled over 50 years ago, as opposed to whiskeys aged 50 years.

Drew Hannush (21:56.083)
Yes, yes.

Joe Wilson (21:57.66)
Yeah, it's a good split. Obviously the growth of the kind of secondary market with whiskey has kind of gone hand in hand with the kind of modern day kind of Renaissance for the particularly the single malt and the bourbon whiskey categories, which has seen new distilleries popping up all the time. There's more new releases than ever. And as an offshoot of that, a lot of the stuff that you tend to sell tends to be fairly recent releases, but we do have a lot of old and rare things.

you know, we have...

a pocket of sellers in that kind of Italy, Germany region where a lot of old single moths were exported in the 60s and 70s, particularly things like McAllen and Glenn Grant, and you always get a good collection of these old bottleings, particularly independent bottleers from Italy like Samaroli and Sostante and Intertrade, all these kind of people, you know, really sought after bottles in a lot of senses, until we came along and made them more accessible almost mid-1980s.

mythological bottles for a lot of collectors. So yeah, I wouldn't know off the top of my head what the percentage was, but certainly there is a lot of old and rare stuff and it can vary wildly from an old blend from the 1970s that maybe sometimes these have the original supermarket stickers on them and stuff and they've cost somebody like $1.50 or 2 million lira or whatever the currency was at the time. So yeah, everything from that up to you know, incredibly rare old bottles.

and Japanese whiskey from the 70s and 80s as well, which is, you know, people send that over from Japan as well. So that's, you know, it's incredible to have not just an auction that's accessible to bidders all over the world, but also to sellers, so you get a real rich variety of things that you can bid on.

Drew Hannush (23:47.462)
It would be funny to have something that said, you know, cost of, uh, 20 francs and then all of a sudden, you know, the thing is selling for a million pounds. Okay. Wow. Inflation and, uh, value really. Have you seen, have you seen something, uh, like that, uh, it just, when you looked at it, it's like these two things just don't seem to fit together.

Joe Wilson (24:15.592)
Yeah, I mean it happens on a regular basis. You'll find either a price sticker on something or even like a receipt tucked down in a box. I think most recently we had, I think one of the Brewer rare malts, the old United Distillers bottlings that came out in the kind of mid 90s, early 2000s. And I think the receipt in the box was for about 35, 40 pounds. And you know, they're really add maybe two zeros onto that now for the value of that bottle. So yeah, it's incredible.

Drew Hannush (24:43.692)
Yeah.

Joe Wilson (24:46.352)
Cool.

Drew Hannush (24:47.322)
So do you find that people are going out and, I mean, we have right now, Buffalo Trace products are on allocation and they continue to come out with things like Prohibition Collection and Antique Collection and all of these different things, which are all new whiskies, but they're whiskies that are rare in number.

Do you find that there are people who seem to have an in and buy a bunch of these and then they're pushing them out onto the auction site fairly quickly?

Joe Wilson (25:20.932)
Yeah, unfortunately that happens.

I don't know the ins and outs of how these people get that in, so to speak, but for sure there will be people who treat the trading of whisky as more than a side hustle, as the kids call it. People who have made their livelihoods from trading bottles and I think you get that in. There's different ways of doing it. There's buying bottles from the old kind of traditional auction houses where the prices

Drew Hannush (25:39.562)
Yeah. Ha ha ha.

Joe Wilson (25:55.094)
don't know what they're bidding on or the competition isn't quite as fierce and then they trade them with us and make some money on them or as you say there are people who haven't in to get these kind of sought-after new releases and it's an unfortunate byproduct of a market that is willing to pay more for something than the stories are pricing them at and then that's something that will happen but you know that the

Joe Wilson (26:21.476)
MO of whiskey auctioneers to deal in old and rare whiskey. You know, we are passionate about old bottles, historical bottles, and that's our passion. And then the other stuff that gets traded, you know, you can't tell people what to and not to sell. So, you know, you will always have some of that. And, you know, with the allocation bottles that you're talking about, you know, it's difficult for people to get them. And even if there's an element of profiteering on it, there is a democratizing element as well where it is bringing these bottles.

Drew Hannush (26:49.932)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Wilson (26:51.23)
to a wider market, so we try to look at the positives in that sense as well.

Drew Hannush (26:56.766)
Yeah, you talked about counterfeiting. Is that, I hear that it is a big problem these days. Are there specific whiskeys that seem to be targeted more than others?

Joe Wilson (27:10.448)
Yeah, I mean it's one of these things you can't...

you can't hide from and bury your head in the sand and pretend it's not happening. And then with the, you know, in the, in the 10 years that whiskey auctioneer has been running for now, the, the amount of bottles that get traded is higher and the prices that these are selling for is higher. And an offshoot of that is that you are going to have people who are going to try and cheat the system and, and profit here from that. So I would say we are probably rejecting out of the 10,000 bottles a month, we're rejecting between 10 and 10 and 20. So it's not a huge amount,

are out there and it's important that we stay ahead of the curve both with you know modern existing counterfeiting measures and modern counterfeiting measures and being aware of the types of bottles that people are looking to fake essentially the types of practices that go into this and you know where these are coming from. So the most common you would tend to find are understandably the high value brands so things like McAllen, things like Paffy

things like Yamazaki in Japan are the most susceptible just because the amount of money that you stand to make from getting away with counterfeiting something like that is so high but you know there's a there's a huge spectrum of everything from kind of opportunistic or even kind of accidental counterfeiting through to more kind of sophisticated methods and you know I've been sent everything from a Glenn Grant that looked like it had purple

Drew Hannush (28:23.7)
Mm.

Joe Wilson (28:43.222)
that had the lids glued back down to. Yeah, it didn't even look like whiskey, but...

Drew Hannush (28:46.235)
Wow.

Drew Hannush (28:49.838)
Hehehehe

Joe Wilson (28:51.46)
all the way through to, you know, Bottles of McAllen where the labels have been entirely reproduced. And, you know, for my part, my role is to take the lead within the company and on tracking these down, making sure that people within the company are aware of what we need to look for. And, you know, if possible to cut off things like this at the source to try and track down where they're coming from to make sure that other people within our kind of auction space, whether that's other auctions.

houses, whether that's collectors, making sure that people are aware of what's going on because we need, you know, although there are other options which are competition, we need the market to be safe because that benefits everybody at the end of the day.

Drew Hannush (29:34.206)
Yeah, well, I would see the real advantage to going through a whiskey auction is that if you have collected the provenance and you've got records on file for it, they've always got something that they can go back and show in saying this is valid because of this, that sort of thing. So it's a service that you're providing beyond just selling their whiskey for them.

Joe Wilson (30:00.24)
Yeah, and it's something that we take incredibly seriously and it's a service.

as much as it's part of the auction, it's also something that we'd be happy to offer to people out with a desire to sell the bottle. If you have something that you are concerned about, I'd be more than happy for someone to email me and ask me questions about a particular bottle. For my part, I'm incredibly fortunate, as we've discussed before, that I see 10,000 bottles every month. So I've seen thousands and thousands of a particular vintage of Macallan and I know now what it should look like.

I know how to spot inconsistencies in the glass type, the glass code, what the label should look like, how something should be sealed, and that goes for countless different brands. When I tell people what I do...

everybody thinks you're kind of like this Indiana Jones type figure, you know, going about with your whip and your hat, catching people faking whiskey. And it's, it's distinctly unglamorous when you kind of get down into the nitty gritty. It's just, it's a lot of record keeping. It's a lot of documenting. It's a lot of keeping data. And then as a result of that cross referencing everything that comes in against your notes and you know, it's, there's always going to be new counterfeits and new methods. And it's, you know, it's about staying on top of things,

place a very secure set of procedures which allow us to pinpoint particularly the known fakes quite easily, which as I said keeps the market safe, which is better for everybody.

Drew Hannush (31:35.126)
Have you ever had something, you said the mouthwash incident?

I watch old movies and a friend of mine said, you're crazy because you have all this knowledge in your head and then you're watching these movies and you're kind of spoiling the movie for yourself because you're over analyzing saying, wait, they wouldn't have had a bottle like that at that time period. So have you come across those where it's people's lack of knowledge in trying to counterfeit that they're like putting a label on a bottle from the 1850s?

kinda thing.

Joe Wilson (32:12.6)
Yeah, you get that. You get, um...

You can do a very simple check sometimes just by comparing the size of a bottle to what it says on the label. We've had 70 CL bottles that were obviously produced in the last 30 years with a label from the 1960s on it, which we just know it doesn't belong there. But it can be, we have procedures in place where I can determine based on the Italian tax strip on a bottle of Samaroli whether or not that's the original tax strip on it.

try to be as cute with it as possible but you know we're aware of what people are trying to do in these counterfeiting practices so everything from opportunism to you know trying to be as devious with it as possible you know we have, we like to think we have an answer for these things so you know it's, it would be a lot easier if everything just had mouthwash in it because you could spot that straight away but unfortunately it's often quite, you know quite nerdy inside knowledge that you have to have.

Drew Hannush (32:59.746)
Ha ha ha.

Drew Hannush (33:09.08)
Yeah.

Joe Wilson (33:15.238)
and it doesn't get people's pulse racing in that kind of Indiana Jones style, but it's important work nonetheless.

Drew Hannush (33:22.287)
Hehehehe

Yes. So you mentioned single malts a lot. Are single malts really the most value at this point or are you finding bourbons, rye and whiskeys from other countries that are doing really well?

Joe Wilson (33:44.592)
I mean it.

We talk about single malt a lot because the majority of what we sell tends to be Scotch single malts and that as a category has been adopted in a lot of other places in the world so Japanese whiskey is a very valuable category of whiskey and a lot of that is single malt but in the last 20 years or so places like the US and Ireland are experiencing real resurgences in their whiskey industries after difficult...

periods through the kind of late 20th century and you know bourbon in particular is one that we focused on a lot in the past probably three or four years we've done three specialist bourbon auctions now that have included you know a lot of promotional content that have gone along with them we've written catalogs and we've done video content we've you know did podcasts like this with Fred Minick and things discussing the bourbon so there's a huge

just in America but spreading kind of globally and we're you know we're starting to see an increased demand for you know all different types of whiskey and again I come back to one of the benefits of having a global audience both in terms of buyers and sellers is that you know a lot of bourbon was exported to Europe and Japan in the kind of 1980s and 1990s and we've been able to in a lot of in a lot of cases almost repatriate these kind of lost bottles of

in America but we've also been able to spread them further afield around the world so you know it's been an interesting one to watch the development of enthusiasm for different types of whisky because you know we are called Whisky Auctioneer, we're not called Single Malt Auctioneer, you know we're passionate about all different types of whisky so you know it might be spelled without the E but you know it's interchangeable.

Drew Hannush (35:40.434)
Yeah, you have to make your choice at some point, whether you're going to put that E in or not. I did, and I put the E in, and sometimes I regret that I put the E in, but I live with it either way. So you got to make a choice. So what is probably the highest valued thing you've sold up to this point?

Joe Wilson (36:08.177)
We sold a private collection called the Gooding Collection back in between 2020 and 2021 and one of the bottles that was part of that was the 1926 McCallan Fine and Rare and the final hammer price on that bottle in our auction was one million pounds which made it the highest single bottle.

auction value for an online auction at the time and still is to this day. So, and that's, you know, far and away the most valuable thing that we've sold. We've had bottles of Yamazaki that have come in at kind of 500, 600,000 region, but nothing has or probably will come close to that McAllen unless we get another one of the 12 bottles that exist or 24 bottles that exist.

Drew Hannush (36:50.83)
Hehehe

Drew Hannush (36:54.902)
Yeah, that's gotta be a fun press release to write.

Joe Wilson (36:58.396)
Yeah, yeah, it's not my job to write the press releases, but I'm sure it was fun to do. I got to write the descriptions, you can really...

Drew Hannush (37:00.098)
Hehehehe

Joe Wilson (37:07.648)
flex your muscles with some flowery language and some particularly leading evocative imagery about how special this bottle was. Cause you know, it truly is incredibly special and genuinely rare at the bottle count that it is. So yeah, I would say hopefully not, but you know, we may never see a bottle like that again. So it's one of these ones where you have to, as I said before, you really have to pinch yourself and remind yourself how fortunate you are to be in a position like that. And also, you know, remind yourself to be careful.

Drew Hannush (37:11.214)
Hehehe

Joe Wilson (37:37.602)
around it as well because yeah it can be quite frightening sometimes thinking that the bottle's worth more than more than you.

Drew Hannush (37:40.592)
Yes.

Drew Hannush (37:49.541)
So I see this picture online and it is of I think there's like 12 bottles there or so that are all lined up. They're all different. They're the same shape but they're all different sizes. Was that actual picture of this Blair Castle collection?

Joe Wilson (38:10.552)
Yeah, so that is, I don't know how many are in the picture you saw, but we were auctioning 24 of them, so it would be between 24 and maybe less in that picture, but yeah, so they're all that kind of old style of hand-blown glass, kind of created in sections that are then all moulded together, so you do get some irregularities in the height and their ability to stand up straight in some instances, which is, you know, it's all part of the charm and I think one of them

Drew Hannush (38:36.002)
Yeah.

Joe Wilson (38:40.466)
has a quite a noticeable imperfection in the punt underneath, which I think means that it's probably a good 5cl extra volume in that bottle. So we'll make sure that one's photographed on the lot and it might be more attractive to some bidders who might see the opportunity to get like a little bit more whiskey in the bottle than is in the others.

Drew Hannush (38:49.698)
Hehehehe

Drew Hannush (39:02.986)
So those were rebottled though, were they not? Is that what I understand at some point?

Joe Wilson (39:08.568)
Yeah, so the castle...

changed hands in the 1930s and I think as part of that process there was a kind of widespread inventorising which included the cellars and all the stock that was down there and I think as part of that process that I don't know what the whiskey was in beforehand but it was obviously deemed that there weren't suitable receptacles for it so they were they were re-bottled into these

Joe Wilson (39:42.602)
The bottles themselves are probably older than that period, whether they were selected to give a kind of aesthetic that befit their vintage, I'm not sure, but certainly the style of cork closure and the wax over the top is consistent with the bottling in that period. So that is something that obviously was one of the first things that we had to check when they came in because as we've said, authentication is one of the founding pillars of what we do. So if somebody phones you up and...

makes what to the naked ear would be a fanciful claim of having found a whiskey distilled in 1833 the first question you have to ask as well when can I see it? because I'm not going to believe it until I see it thankfully I did see it and you know it's an absolutely as I said before you know probably a once in a lifetime discovery and a momentous moment not just for

Drew Hannush (40:17.279)
Mm.

Drew Hannush (40:23.542)
Be bright.

Drew Hannush (40:28.264)
Yeah.

Joe Wilson (40:42.842)
an auction house or for the castle itself, but for whisky history and Scottish history and for anybody interested in either of those things, it's a truly special find.

Drew Hannush (40:55.646)
So 1833 is when it was distilled and bottled in 1841? Is that originally bottled as I understand it?

Joe Wilson (41:05.956)
Yeah, so these are the purported dates. Obviously, you can't be exactly sure, but we've obviously done everything we can to try and verify these, both in terms of working with Blair Castle to dig through their archives to find kind of documentary history of the whisky existing first and foremost, and that these dates correlate, and then also using scientific methods to back that up.

they didn't just find one but they found 40 which has allowed us to open a bottle up because that's the big barrier that you have in the job that we do it'd be a lot more easy it'd be a lot easier to guarantee that something wasn't just a bottle of mouthwash if you could open it up and give it a smell but we can't open the bottles so we have to know as much as we can about the bottles themselves about how they should look and then also the provenance that surrounds them so yeah they were discovered with a plaque that

Drew Hannush (41:50.816)
Yeah.

Joe Wilson (42:05.95)
distilled in 1833, bottled in 1841 as he said and then re-bottled again in the early 1930s.

Drew Hannush (42:14.03)
Okay, and so you like me then, you hear something like this, because there was a whiskey auction probably about a year ago where they thought that the whiskey had come from the 1700s. Somehow it had survived not being bottled, but put into some kind of container. Now I would assume that if it was put into a container in the 1700s, it would have to be some kind of container that would stop aging.

Otherwise, if it continues to age through from 18 or 17 something to 1860, when it was said it was actually then bottled, you would go, I don't know what that's going to taste like, but it's probably not going to taste great. Then it's re-bottled. Now you have provenance from that time period forward. And they did liquid testing on it. And the testing that they did came back through carbon dating.

And this is the question about carbon dating and the idea of provenance versus carbon dating. What do you lean on more? And is carbon dating really that helpful in getting to a specific date or is that more in trying to get to maybe a range of dates?

Joe Wilson (43:34.16)
Yes, I think provenance is key in all situations. And as I said before, carbon dating is very much a last resort for us in terms of what we do on a day-to-day basis with what we sell. Primarily because it's an invasive procedure. You have to...

If it's something like this with a driven cork, they'll syringe the bottle and take a sample of it and then they'll reseal it with some wax, but that could be difficult if you have like a tea cork stopper that prevents the syringe getting in. So there's an element of tampering that necessarily comes along with carbon dating, which obviously isn't always ideal. It's an expensive procedure as well. And, you know, there is.

It's a science, but it's not an exact science in a lot of cases. So what it can do is tell you what something isn't, but it's not quite as helpful with telling you what something is. So it is useful. It's not a useful thing to do. And obviously when we're dealing with something of this age, because we've never seen something like this before, we don't know what it's supposed to look like or smell like or anything like that.

bottles that I deal with on a daily basis I know from an empirical understanding of what that bottle should look like, what the label should look like, what the capsule should look like, but with something like this I have no idea and nobody has any idea so we have to rely on the science and the results came back and it gives you a probability and within that probability there was a high chance that the whiskey was distilled within

that 1833 vintage range and what you can't take that as gospel truth for why for when it was distilled but it helps you to alleviate doubt based on the documentary evidence that was acquired in the provenance ascertaining the provenance stage beforehand so yeah it's um it's useful it's not

Joe Wilson (45:44.572)
it's never going to tell you exactly what something is, but it told us that it didn't tell us that it wasn't what we thought it was and it gave us a high probability that it is what we think it is. We're fairly confident based on that coupled with some of the other scientific analysis that we've had conducted elsewhere and the provenance that we've gathered that we think that everything fits together fairly compellingly and that we're happy to go ahead. Because if we didn't...

Drew Hannush (45:51.991)
Yeah.

Joe Wilson (46:15.129)
feel confident and that's we wouldn't bring it to auction.

Drew Hannush (46:18.41)
Yeah. Does it also tell you what the liquid is made from? That can you tell that it is a single malt or the other grains were potentially used in the process?

Joe Wilson (46:31.096)
Yeah, there are tests that you can do that will tell you to certain degrees what these are and that involves analysing the volatile congeners. I'm not a scientist so I'm not going to attempt to go into too much detail as to how that works but it is able to tell you when something is made from certain types of grain. It can often tell you what those grains are with kind of more modern

Drew Hannush (46:45.582)
Hehehehe

Joe Wilson (47:01.07)
compare them to. So the difficulty you have with this is that there aren't any whiskies apart from these that claim to have been distilled at that time so there isn't things to compare it to. But the Scotch Whiskey Research Institute who we worked with on those tests, they do have a large cache of very old whiskies and very old samples and they were able to give us a probability that you know the production was in line with how distilling would have taken place at the time.

confirmed that it would have been distilled from grain in the same methods that malt whisky would have been produced in the early 19th century and they were also able to do a kind of phenolic test so you're able to get a gauge on how peated the barley was and it also confirmed that the whisky was aged in an oak cask which although not a legal requirement back then as it is now it is quite nice to be able to say that it was produced in line with what are the modern

regulations for producing Scotch whisky.

Drew Hannush (48:04.126)
Yeah, this is what's really interesting in digging back into history and I'm dealing with Tennessee whiskey history right now. They didn't really have a fascination with the barrel in the early to mid 1800s. They had different ways to mellow out a whiskey to get it to market and the taxman didn't really give you an advantage for putting it in a barrel. So there was no reason to put it in a barrel. You just wanted to make a quick profit off of the stuff.

That's why thinking about the way bottles were designed back then and thinking about the way whiskey was made, we can get too lost in our modern sensibilities of things and try to put that onto a previously made whiskey. When you're trying to sell something like this and you're trying to price it, if you

Drew Hannush (49:04.694)
and everything has verified out, do you think that you would have to really sell somebody on this whiskey rather than them just going, oh that is whiskey, because by legal definition now, if it's not been aged, then it's not whiskey. But if it came in clear like that, it's still got historical value, it's just do people understand that historical value?

Joe Wilson (49:33.604)
Yeah, and I think at the end of the day, it's, you know, as much as we're talking about things that have transcended being a consumable product to become, you know, artifacts from whiskey history, you know, that this is something that should still be able to be drank if you can afford to buy one, an open one. So there are...

kind of considerations that come along with that and one of them is the colour and if the whiskey is completely clear then even if you have done all your due diligence and confirmed that it is whiskey there is going to be people who are questioning you know whether or not that's something that's safe to drink whether it's been produced in the right manner and you can get it in the modern day there's a there's a bottling by a German independent company called the Whiskey Agency I can't remember what it is I think it might be a Glenallic or something but it's green

in the bottle. It's a bizarre thing to look at and people, we don't get it in the auction that often but it comes up every now and again and people will email in and say what's wrong with that you know it's just and you can't really explain it. It's been in a bourbon cask, I don't know what kind of bourbon it was but somehow it's just imparted this very kind of green hue and there's a very famous royal Bracla, it's actually called Green Bracla, it was bottled by the Whiskey Exchange and it's the same, it's just got this slightly kind of green tinge to it

cask and it's legendary, it's really highly reviewed by Serge Valentin of Whiskey Fun and stuff and people are desperate to try it and it's a strange one because people...

people will see something and they have an idea in their head of what it should look like and what it's going to taste like and then when something doesn't look quite like it should, there is a degree of having to reassure people and it would be the same with something like this. But as I said, we've opened bottles of this and it's just your regular whisky colour. It's actually quite pale kind of gold colour. It's obviously quite a young whisky because it was bottled sub 10 years old.

Joe Wilson (51:40.514)
probably it would have been eight or nine when it was bottled and you don't know what kind of, you don't know whether the cask would have been charred in the kind of modern method. You don't know how often the cask had been used beforehand but it certainly hasn't imparted a huge amount of kind of oak-y colour to the whisky but it does have this like incredibly kind of pale gold and a kind of freshness to it that you expect from quite a youthful whisky and it's, you know, when you consider that it's

Thanks for watching!

It's only eight or nine years old, but it was made 200 years ago. It's, um, there's something about being in its presence that is really special. And it's, um, it's an incredible opportunity that we are able to share 24 bottles with, um, the lucky people who are going to be able to afford to buy these. And, you know, if, if they choose to open them, they too will have this, you know, incredible, I keep saying it, a once in a lifetime, uh, opportunity, um, and, uh, you know, a truly transient experience for somebody who's interested in whiskey.

you know, one of the most special things you could do for yourself, I think.

Drew Hannush (52:46.722)
Fascinating to think about that light character in the color. Now, if you asked me, you know, just months ago about that, I would have said, oh, well, you know, maybe this is, maybe they were, you know.

fourth fill, fifth fill, whatever on a particular barrel. But then I started doing some research and found that even in the early 1800s in the United States, the practice was to clean a barrel out as much as you could so you didn't impart any color on the whiskey. You wanted no barrel influence from it. It was a container to ship your whiskey around to somewhere. It wasn't necessarily to add color and flavors to the whiskey. They didn't want to...

ruin what was in that distillate from the beginning. And again, that's an education point that a consumer might not know unless historians are really digging into this and trying to find, and looking at examples like the bottles that you just got that are showing that there wasn't necessarily a desire for color back then.

Joe Wilson (54:00.252)
Yeah, exactly. And obviously the...

The cask was, is mentioned in what they refer to as a bin book in the archives at the castle and I think in 1833 there's a record stating that the cask was there in storage and you don't know what the kind of surrounding circumstances with bottling it would have been but maybe the preference at the time or within the castle or within whoever was the intended drinker of them was to have a more youthful whisky, you know, there's all these considerations that go along with it, you know.

as to what their flavor preference would have been or the kind of character of the whiskey would have been or if you know there were issues with the cask leaking or something that made them want to bottle it earlier so there's a lot of different unknown variables but yeah it's one of these kind of it's an unbelievable thing to see it because you kind of don't really know what to expect when you open a bottle of whiskey from 200 years ago but then you pour it out and it's

in its essence is just a glass of whiskey and it's so familiar and it's something that you deal with all the time but it's the oldest version of that thing that I deal with on a daily basis and it's almost like touching like the tip of the mountain or something you know it's really strange.

Drew Hannush (55:25.858)
So you have 40 bottles, but you're selling 24. So what is going on with the other bottles? Were they rejected because of potential issues with them or are they coming somewhere down the road?

Joe Wilson (55:43.565)
It's a bit of...

There's a few different issues. There are some where the condition, as you would expect for something that old, they've not all held up as well as the ones that we're bringing to auction. So there's a few where there's been evaporation or the, you know, the liquid looks like it's just been spoiled over time with, you know, maybe an imperfection in the cork, but the there's also, you know, the consideration that these are heritage of not just

Joe Wilson (56:14.842)
so they obviously want to retain some of these and I think the future plan is to build some exhibition content around the bottles, around the discovery and that will probably be part of the exhibition, we'll cover what we're working on at Whiskey Auctioneer with the sale. So yeah, it's not like they discovered it and they saw an opportunity to make loads of money, it was that they discovered it, it was...

It was, I think...

They say it was discovered, obviously the current trustee, Bertie, discovered the whisky but then when speaking to his mother, apparently it was known about but they hadn't really ever considered that there was any kind of historical or financial value to it. So when he discovered it, he realised that this was something momentous for the castle first and foremost. So the idea was always to build that into the kind of visitor and heritage experience that they have as part of the castle there. But because they discovered so much of it.

there was also an opportunity to share this with a few lucky people around the world so they initially got in touch with us you know just to help with establishing kind of an idea of the value and idea of the demand that there might be for something like that and then we were able to work with them on this project which is culminating at the end of next month and bringing them to market so yeah the short answer is the some of the bottles are spoiled and

are still in perfect condition and these will go on display because they're part of the castle. Some will become part of people's collections and some will remain part of the castle's collection as well.

Drew Hannush (57:58.09)
Discovery sounds so much better than we just lost track of the inventory.

Joe Wilson (58:03.867)
Yeah, yeah, that's why we're sticking with it.

Drew Hannush (58:09.578)
Yeah, it's funny because I got to taste a 75 year old, it was aged in a barrel for 75 years in Ireland. And the story was that it was just a barrel that was kind of lost in the corner somewhere. So again, discovered, but you know, it's got to be sitting on an inventory sheet somewhere. Somebody has to know. It's not like this.

portion of the building just disappeared for 75 years and nobody was paying any attention. The amazing thing was that there was still a lot of liquid left in the barrel because the wood had, as he said, petrified. And so it seemed like it had just pretty much lost any ability to age the whiskey. And the whiskey tasted like it was well-aged but not oaky, which was absolutely amazing. So you just have no idea.

what these whiskies will present to you. But I'm assuming though that when collectors are buying these, they're probably less interested in tasting notes than they are in that provenance and the history, because there's not a plan to really open them and drink them. If you can pay a million pounds for a whiskey, are you just gonna pop the cork on it and go?

Joe Wilson (59:29.56)
Yeah, well, I think these are a special case because they are so old. They are basically 24, one of a kind, you know.

as I said, artifacts from whiskey history, and that there will be people. I'll be interesting to see what the bidding is like, because I have a suspicion that there will be people who have deep enough pockets to satisfy a curiosity to try these, because when else are you gonna be able to do this, but there will also be people who see the bottles as an investment opportunity as well. I think when you look at what makes a whiskey valuable,

Drew Hannush (59:53.706)
Mm.

Joe Wilson (01:00:09.63)
in the kind of modern era. So, you know, the things that we deal with on a kind of monthly basis, I think tasting notes are important because something has to develop its own legend or its own mystique, so to speak. And that comes from people trying the whiskey and talking about the whiskey and sharing the whiskey and the stories and their opinions with like-minded people. And that's the crux of it. And it always will be, which is what makes whiskey so special. But there are certain brands today

have just an inherent value in the brand. So something like McCallan, something like Yamazaki and you know, yeah, you could buy a 50 year old Yamazaki and it doesn't really matter what it tastes like because somebody will be willing to pay for that again in the future. But I think the important thing is that the reason those brands have that value today is because of what I said before, is because they are historically known to be exceptional producers

Joe Wilson (01:01:09.63)
because people have tried them, people have talked about them, so you know we always encourage people to drink as much whiskey as they can, you know. Seems strange for an auctioneer to say that because if everybody drank everything then we'd have nothing to sell, but you know we think that with something like this I think there might be people who might try to buy two, like a drink one keep one type thing. So yeah it's a strange one because you know there aren't, if you miss these in this auction there's not

Drew Hannush (01:01:17.602)
Hehe.

Drew Hannush (01:01:22.422)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (01:01:32.663)
Mm.

Joe Wilson (01:01:39.37)
going to be 24 more next month that you can pick up on so if there are people and I'm sure there are people who will want to try this whiskey there

I think people might buy it and open some and we will have a bottle open in the coming weeks to do a tasting panel event. So prior to the auction going live there will be, as I said, people trying it and discussing it and sharing their opinions about it and hopefully people will, even if they're not going to buy it and open it to drink it, that will add an extra layer of interest and intrigue and something to connect to this story. We're trying to build as many layers in as possible.

because obviously there are only 24 and that limits the pool of people who can actually acquire one but there's interest miles beyond that and we want to make sure that we cater to as many people who are interested in exploring these even if that's just on a content basis and not on a sensory one so to speak.

Drew Hannush (01:02:41.852)
This has to be one of the toughest projects you've probably worked on in terms of trying to figure out a value to start these at. So what criteria will you use to determine where you're going to start the pricing on these?

Joe Wilson (01:02:59.94)
Yes, I mean when you when you give a valuation for something it's usually based on a price history you know we've sold most things before so we have an idea of what somebody at some point was willing to pay for it but these are these are entirely new to us so we have no um

precedent for making a valuation on these. So the way our auction is set up is that everything starts from £15. We have a minimum alcohol pricing law here in Scotland which dictates that it just came in a few years ago. We used to start the bidding at 25p but now it has to be, nobody ever got anything for 25p but that's just where it starts. But now it's £15 and that's where they will, that's what all the bottles will be set to from the beginning

Drew Hannush (01:03:39.374)
Ha ha ha.

Joe Wilson (01:03:49.862)
to sell for £15 but we expect that...

Probably the power bottle price, we're maybe looking at 10,000 pounds per bottle as a conservative estimate and who knows, it's a difficult one to judge because as I said before, we do have the consideration that there might be people buying to invest, people buying to drink and it just depends on how much people are willing to pay to satisfy these desires and we just don't know yet because we've never had anything like this before.

Drew Hannush (01:04:25.282)
So what week is the auction supposed to take place for these?

Joe Wilson (01:04:29.256)
So it's almost a month's time, so it will start on the 24th of November, which is the last Friday in November, and it will run for 10 days and finish on the...

Joe Wilson (01:04:44.56)
on the 4th of December. And the closing procedure for the auction, it starts to end from 10pm British time, so I'm not sure what that will be, where you are, or where any of your listeners will be, it might be different for other people, but any time there's a bid placed on any lot within the auction, it gets extended for two minutes, so that means that it can tend to run on for between three and four hours after that, seven o'clock.

Drew Hannush (01:04:47.052)
Okay.

Drew Hannush (01:05:01.086)
Yeah

Joe Wilson (01:05:14.534)
deadline and the reason we do that is to protect people against that kind of sniper bidding that you'd be familiar with on eBay if we just set a hard deadline nobody would bid on anything until seven o'clock and then you just have this big mehly of people trying to get the last bid in at the last minute so it's you know it's the best solution for that we found and it suits some people some people like it some people don't but we don't have a

Drew Hannush (01:05:29.748)
Ugh.

Drew Hannush (01:05:33.675)
Yeah.

Joe Wilson (01:05:44.354)
So, you know, it means you don't lose your bottle if you're paying attention to it. So yeah, that's why we do it like that.

Drew Hannush (01:05:53.162)
Yeah. Well, fantastic. I'm really, for people who are trying to put together their Christmas list, this is, this may be a little out of your price range, but somebody really special. They'll love you forever if you gift them a bottle of this for the holidays. But I...

Joe Wilson (01:06:15.016)
Yeah, all you can do is ask.

Drew Hannush (01:06:18.33)
Exactly. Hey, a stocking stuffer. Perfect stocking stuffer for me. I look forward to seeing what this actually goes for, that press release when it comes out, so we can see how this all went. I appreciate you going through and talking through this. I know it's a busy time for you. You probably got another auction coming up this week.

Joe Wilson (01:06:24.563)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (01:06:45.578)
Thanks for spending the time and talking through this. And man, I wish you a lot of luck in the sales on these and hope your tasting panel goes great. And would love to hear from you actually about what that experience is like offline because I can just imagine what that would be like.

Joe Wilson (01:07:07.164)
Yeah, I mean, thank you for having me on. Obviously, this is...

For me personally, it's one of the most exciting things I've done within my career. So it's a really special time and as much as it's a joy to work with the bottles, it's also a joy to talk about them. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to come on and do that. It's a pleasure. And I hope that other people find as much interest and intrigue in these as they can. And I'll do my best to try and give them as much information and as much of an engaging experience with these bottles as I can.

Drew Hannush (01:07:41.226)
Perfect. And to get in on the auction, how will they do that? What's the website?

Joe Wilson (01:07:41.543)
Bye.

Joe Wilson (01:07:47.748)
So it's whiskyauctioneer.com, whiskywithoutanywhiskyauctioneer.com and you just need to register for an account. It takes less than five minutes to do and once you're in you can you can bid not just on these bottles but any of the 10,000 bottles that we have in each of the monthly sales. And yeah, as you said, we have we have one starting tomorrow. So if this goes out next week, the auction will be kind of in full swing. So people can dive right in and have a look around.

Drew Hannush (01:08:16.118)
All right, thank you so much, Joe. And as I say, good luck with the auction and look forward to seeing how it all comes off. Cheers.

Joe Wilson (01:08:23.668)
Thank you.