Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Deblane and Chocolate Barding and I'm fair And we
Speaker 1: just did an episode on that was a sampling of
Speaker 1: historic spirits, and we mostly focused on that episode on
Speaker 1: ancient alcohols. So the truly old finds that were found,
Speaker 1: as Sarah put it, gunk, the gunky alcohol, the gunky
Speaker 1: alcohols that were found as residues some might say, on
Speaker 1: old pottery, things that were found in two vessels. Yes,
Speaker 1: so not really stuff that you can drink. And in
Speaker 1: this portion of the episode, the second part, we're going
Speaker 1: to focus on older alcohols that you could taste if
Speaker 1: you came across one exactly, So things that are still drinkable,
Speaker 1: maybe not necessarily delicious alcohol, not all alcohol ages well,
Speaker 1: but something that does still have a liquid property to it.
Speaker 1: Most of these are hundreds of years old or even
Speaker 1: less than a hundred years old, whereas in the last
Speaker 1: episode we were talking about alcohol residues that were thousands
Speaker 1: of years old. But in this case researchers can still
Speaker 1: study what's in the bottle chemically analyze it, but they
Speaker 1: can also sample it we're not going to just talk
Speaker 1: about old alcohol though. We're going to talk about some
Speaker 1: finds that aren't really that old. After all. They're just
Speaker 1: really interesting historically, they're connected to an important historical event
Speaker 1: or an important historical figure, and we thought they were
Speaker 1: worth including. Yeah, they're just cool stories in a lot
Speaker 1: of cases. And this first one that we're going to
Speaker 1: start with is a story that I think a lot
Speaker 1: of people have probably heard about because it was so
Speaker 1: recent it made the news. In July two thousand ten,
Speaker 1: Swedish divers were exploring a wreck in the Baltic just
Speaker 1: south of the Oland Islands between Sweden and Finland. At
Speaker 1: two feet visibility was really bad. They couldn't see any
Speaker 1: identifying info on the ship or locate the bell, but
Speaker 1: they did find some bottles, most of them undamaged, and
Speaker 1: they decided to take some up and try to date
Speaker 1: the wreck that way. It turned out that they were
Speaker 1: about one hundred and forty five bottles of champagne on
Speaker 1: this ship, very likely the oldest champagne in the world,
Speaker 1: and the dates in this really interested me, kind of
Speaker 1: perplexed me a little. Almost every article we came across
Speaker 1: puts the shipwreck at eighteen hundred to eighteen thirty, and
Speaker 1: the alcohol obviously around that same period. I did find
Speaker 1: one outlier, though, one date that is significantly before that,
Speaker 1: and it kind of made some of the points that
Speaker 1: the articles made, mentioning that perhaps this alcohol was a
Speaker 1: shipment from Louis the sixteenth of France to the Imperial
Speaker 1: Court of Russia, which if we're talking eight hundred eighteen thirty,
Speaker 1: that doesn't make sense because Louis was dead. These dates
Speaker 1: make it seem a little more natural. The Champagne included
Speaker 1: bottles of of Cluko, which is one of the finest
Speaker 1: brands of Champagne even today, and that brand was first
Speaker 1: made in seventeen seventy two, but those bottles were laid
Speaker 1: down for at least ten years, so using that day,
Speaker 1: it seemed like the wreck couldn't be older than seventeen
Speaker 1: eighty two, but couldn't be after eight or eighty nine
Speaker 1: because the Champagne houses production was disrupted obviously during the
Speaker 1: French Revolution, so a little discrepancy. They're not entirely sure
Speaker 1: about when this wreck really happened, judging by the articles
Speaker 1: written on it, and once they figure out more details
Speaker 1: about the wreck, that may become more clear. So the
Speaker 1: story they're still developing, But what about the champagne itself?
Speaker 1: Does it really last that long? And apparently we find that, yes,
Speaker 1: it does. I love the story. I love when you're
Speaker 1: reading the stories about when they brought the champagne up
Speaker 1: and it's like that. Some stories say that the divers
Speaker 1: that when they brought it up the pressure of coming
Speaker 1: to the surface the cork, or maybe they popped the
Speaker 1: cork themselves, but they tasted it expecting to taste seawater
Speaker 1: and found that no, in fact, it actually tasted good.
Speaker 1: It tasted just like champagne, and an old and wine
Speaker 1: expert who sampled the bottle described it as absolutely fabulous.
Speaker 1: She even described looking at the samples in her fridge
Speaker 1: after they weren't being consumed anymore and just thinking it
Speaker 1: was absolutely miraculous that she had these. So it turns
Speaker 1: out that the Baltic made a pretty great storage spot
Speaker 1: for champagne for really long term storage. It's got a
Speaker 1: constant cold temperature, but it's never going to freeze and
Speaker 1: there's no light which can quickly degrade champagne. So even
Speaker 1: though some of these champagne bottles may have been cracked
Speaker 1: or the corks had corroded and maybe ruined the taste.
Speaker 1: A lot of them were still intact, and they were
Speaker 1: available in November for a taste when there were two
Speaker 1: bottles were cracked open. A Bloomberg writer named Richard Vines
Speaker 1: described it thus. He said that the jugular was quote
Speaker 1: remarkably fresh, the fist had all almost gone, and it
Speaker 1: was too sweet for today's palette. Yet it retained a
Speaker 1: distinctive smell of orange and raisins, like a Christmas cake.
Speaker 1: It might still be served as a dessert wine. Well,
Speaker 1: So that description must have been pretty tantalizing to some people, apparently,
Speaker 1: because two bottles of the champagne, one of two different kinds,
Speaker 1: sold for fifty four thousand euros, which is the equivalent
Speaker 1: to seventy eight thousand, nine hundred and seventy five dollars
Speaker 1: to an anonymous buyer from Singapore just this summer. So
Speaker 1: I'm curious, like, who would that person be spending seventy
Speaker 1: eight thousand, almost seventy nine thousand dollars on champagne? Somebody
Speaker 1: like me who like sweet wine. I guess it was
Speaker 1: to Blaine at everybody it was was exposed here I
Speaker 1: did not buy the champagne, so don't start any rumors
Speaker 1: with that, Sarah, But I will say that there is
Speaker 1: a point of interest here for people who don't like
Speaker 1: champagne or wine. Even there was also beer found in
Speaker 1: the shipwreck. Through the champagne, they found the world's oldest
Speaker 1: drinkable beer, also a hundred sixty ft under the water well.
Speaker 1: And the way they realized it was beer is kind
Speaker 1: of interesting. They were bringing up one of the bottles
Speaker 1: of the champagne when it exploded, because it's the pressure,
Speaker 1: and instead of expelling something that looked like champagne, it
Speaker 1: was this dark liquid and it was pretty clear that's
Speaker 1: not champagne, it's beer. So five bottles total were recovered
Speaker 1: and they're currently being studied by the Technical Research Center
Speaker 1: of Finland, and just this June they reported back that
Speaker 1: the first bottle that was open had unfortunately been contaminated
Speaker 1: by saltwater, so not so lucky as the champagne. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: also the YE cells had been killed, and they were
Speaker 1: hoping that maybe they could reculture those those Z cells
Speaker 1: from old even though they were able to detect live
Speaker 1: lactic acid bacteria, which that's kind of fascinating to me
Speaker 1: that the specteria has been growing in this bottle for
Speaker 1: centuries now. Yeah, so maybe not something that you'll want
Speaker 1: to bid on right away, but it is interesting to
Speaker 1: see what the beer was made of back in the day.
Speaker 1: And there's still those other bottles left to study, so
Speaker 1: it's hoped that perhaps some of them weren't contaminated by
Speaker 1: saltwater and still have something semi drinkable, or at least
Speaker 1: maybe some cells that they can start growing. So our
Speaker 1: next entry takes us away from champagne and beer to
Speaker 1: something a little bit harder. In nineteen o seven, Sir
Speaker 1: Ernest Shackleton made a push for the South Pole with
Speaker 1: his Endurance expedition. He got close about a hundred miles away,
Speaker 1: but he decided to turn back and save his men,
Speaker 1: unlike some other polar explorers that we won't mention here.
Speaker 1: When Shackleton left though, in nineteen o nine, in March
Speaker 1: of that year, winter ice was forming, so he got
Speaker 1: out really fast and he had to leave some cases
Speaker 1: of whiskey behind. The trip in general had kind of
Speaker 1: a strange packing list. It had ponies, a motor car,
Speaker 1: man pulled sledges, a cocaine forced march pills, but also
Speaker 1: tons of booze, cases of whiskey, twelve cases of brandy,
Speaker 1: and six cases of port. That's a lot to bring.
Speaker 1: There were not that many guys going on this trip either,
Speaker 1: so that unconsumed whiskey was found buried under two feet
Speaker 1: of ice, and Shackleton's hut, again, like the Champagne's, is
Speaker 1: going to prove to be a really great storage condition.
Speaker 1: But researchers. Researchers have wondered why exactly Shackleton left it
Speaker 1: behind besides that impending march ice. Some think that he
Speaker 1: might have intended to return, and in which case it
Speaker 1: would be nice to already have a little store of
Speaker 1: whiskey waiting for you. But others think that it was
Speaker 1: the secret stash of another expedition member, somebody who had
Speaker 1: pocketed a few bottles or cases. I mean that seems
Speaker 1: like it would be difficult to do, but had created
Speaker 1: his own secret store of whiskey. Regardless, the store was
Speaker 1: lost until two thousand six, nobody really remembered it was there.
Speaker 1: That's when Explores local it to the bottles and later
Speaker 1: came back with special drills to extract them. But it's
Speaker 1: interesting the modern connection here because there is a company
Speaker 1: that still manufactures this brand of whiskey, and it got
Speaker 1: pretty interested. Yeah. Once the whiskey was identified as rare
Speaker 1: old brand by McKinley and Company Whiskey, the company that
Speaker 1: now owns McKinley and Company, White and Mackey was very
Speaker 1: interested in obtaining samples and recreating the Scotch So in
Speaker 1: January two thousand eleven, a case finally returned to Scotland
Speaker 1: where it was analyzed before they had to return the bottles.
Speaker 1: Everyone expected something really heavy and petty, fitting with the
Speaker 1: taste of the times, but instead it was really light.
Speaker 1: People were pleasantly surprised, and the chemical analysis they were
Speaker 1: able to do prove that this was a pretty high
Speaker 1: end whiskey, or at least it seems now they the
Speaker 1: people who made it, clearly went to some trouble to
Speaker 1: do so. The water was from lock nests and the
Speaker 1: peat was from the Orkney Islands and that was used
Speaker 1: to smoke the barley. So White and Mackie tried to
Speaker 1: recreate the taste. They couldn't just wait years and years
Speaker 1: and let it age. They had to create a blend.
Speaker 1: But they're now selling Shackson's Whiskey for a pretty hefty sum,
Speaker 1: not as much as those bottles of champagne, but still
Speaker 1: a hundred and sixty dollars a bottle. So an interesting
Speaker 1: resurrected alcohol. They're kind of akin to the beers we
Speaker 1: talked about in the last podcast. Yeah, and actually, when
Speaker 1: you think about some of the prices price tags we've
Speaker 1: been throwing around, that's a pretty affordable sum with the
Speaker 1: next entry on our list that we're going to move
Speaker 1: back to one of those heftier price tags. And also
Speaker 1: a historical event that I think everyone's probably heard of.
Speaker 1: On November two thousand nine, a bottle of lower Brow
Speaker 1: Lagger broke the world record for price paid for a
Speaker 1: bottle of beer when it's sold for more than sixteen thousand,
Speaker 1: six hundred and eighty dollars or ten thousand pounds. So
Speaker 1: you have to think it must be a really good
Speaker 1: bottle of beer, right, Actually not, yeah, not at all.
Speaker 1: It just has a really good story behind it. That
Speaker 1: beer was actually on the Hindenburg when the German airship
Speaker 1: exploded as it landed in New Jersey in seven So
Speaker 1: the Zeppelin as we know, was engulfed in flames killing
Speaker 1: thirty eight people and injuring sixty and while cleaning up
Speaker 1: the airfield later, a New Jersey firefighter named Leroy Smith
Speaker 1: stumbled across a few items that survived the crash, intact
Speaker 1: six bottles of lower Brow beer and a picture. All right,
Speaker 1: So this firefighter buried the item so he could come
Speaker 1: back and get them later, because at that point the
Speaker 1: area had been sealed off by the authorities. Once he
Speaker 1: retrieved them, he kept one for himself and gave the
Speaker 1: other five to his colleagues, the sort of mementos of
Speaker 1: this crash. Most of the others ended up being lost,
Speaker 1: but one was donated to the Lower Brow company after
Speaker 1: Smith's friend who had had it died, and Smith's bottle
Speaker 1: and the picture passed on to his niece in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty six, and they were put on sale in two
Speaker 1: thousand nine. By the years that Henry Aldrich and son.
Speaker 1: So we have these two bottles kind of coming through
Speaker 1: a plus the picture, which all managed to survive the crash,
Speaker 1: and there was fierce competition for that bottle of beer
Speaker 1: that was auctioned off, including telephone bitters, mostly from the
Speaker 1: US before it's sold. And the picture, which is silver plated,
Speaker 1: and there's the logo of the Zeppelin Airline Company sold
Speaker 1: for almost as much. Prices paid for these items were
Speaker 1: actually greater than those paid for items connected to Elvis,
Speaker 1: Diana Ross and Paul McCartney, which were auctioned off on
Speaker 1: the same day. Well, there's a survivor element to it
Speaker 1: that it did manage to survive a crash like this.
Speaker 1: But there's a catch. We didn't say it was good.
Speaker 1: You can't actually drink the beer. Auctioneer Andrew Aldrich told
Speaker 1: BBC News quote, it is probably quite putrid to taste,
Speaker 1: So I don't know, maybe that would be a relief
Speaker 1: if you spent that much money on alcohol if you
Speaker 1: couldn't go ahead, didn't drink it. Well, you're obviously just
Speaker 1: buying it for its historical value, but even for that,
Speaker 1: I think it's it's probably worth it to a lot
Speaker 1: of people. Our next entry, though, didn't involve just keeping
Speaker 1: an expensive bottle on the shelf as some sort of
Speaker 1: historical artifact. This amoutumous buyer actually consumed the drink we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about next. Okay, so we'll just tell
Speaker 1: you the story straight out and then give you a
Speaker 1: little background on the alcohol involved. In two thousand five,
Speaker 1: an anonymous guests anonymous to us, that is, at Pennyhill
Speaker 1: Park Hotel in Bagshot, Surrey made headlines when he bought
Speaker 1: a bottle of Dalmore sixty two whiskey for thirty two
Speaker 1: thousand pounds or fifty eight thousand dollars and then proceeded
Speaker 1: to drink it with a group of his friends like
Speaker 1: right away to right, yeah, pretty much right there in
Speaker 1: the hotel. And this wasn't just any fancy whiskey. Dal Moore,
Speaker 1: which is a tiny Scottish distillery, created it by combining
Speaker 1: casks of malt from eighteen sixty eight, eighteen seventy eight,
Speaker 1: ninety six and nineteen third nine to make the single malt,
Speaker 1: which made the youngest of the ingredients sixty two years old,
Speaker 1: hence the name. When it was bottled, so it was
Speaker 1: one of only twelve of these bottles ever made, and
Speaker 1: each of the twelve bottles is named after different characters
Speaker 1: and events in the distilleries history, so they kind of
Speaker 1: added their own historical twist to it. The one that
Speaker 1: was consumed at the hotel was called the maths And
Speaker 1: after Alexander maths And who founded the distillery in eighteen
Speaker 1: thirty nine. One bottle is still left at the distillery.
Speaker 1: Others were sold to private collectors. But it's not like
Speaker 1: you could just go up to a bar and order
Speaker 1: one of these remaining bottles and put down your thirty
Speaker 1: two pounds and walk away. According to an article in
Speaker 1: the Telegraph, the hotel bought its bottle from dealers for
Speaker 1: around thirty one thousand pounds quote, little expecting it to
Speaker 1: be drunk. Another one of these bottles, for instance, has
Speaker 1: sold an auction in two thousand two for twenty five thousand,
Speaker 1: eight hundred and seventy seven pounds in fifty pence. So
Speaker 1: it seems like there's a little range here for what
Speaker 1: you'll pay for one of these bottles. But the price
Speaker 1: paid by the hotel guests ended up being the world
Speaker 1: record for a single mold. Nobody seemed too upset though,
Speaker 1: about the fact that he drank it. An employee who
Speaker 1: looks after the hotel's v I P guests got to
Speaker 1: taste it. He was offered to taste, and he said
Speaker 1: that the flavor was quote exquisite, and he said that
Speaker 1: the buyer, the person who bought it quote has the
Speaker 1: philosophy that there's no point in buying these fine whiskeys
Speaker 1: and never drinking them. I can I can get behind
Speaker 1: that idea. I can too. I kind of like that.
Speaker 1: The hotel manager wouldn't identify the buyer, but he said
Speaker 1: that he was a quote regular hotel guest and a
Speaker 1: private collector of fine spirits. Clearly this The distilleries master
Speaker 1: blender Richard Patterson was also quoted as saying that he
Speaker 1: was happy the bottle had been open, shared and enjoyed.
Speaker 1: And the buyer, you know, obviously doesn't have that whiskey anymore,
Speaker 1: but he has the memories of drinking it, and he
Speaker 1: still has the bottle to save. I don't know if
Speaker 1: he did save it, but he would have that and
Speaker 1: the presentation case. So maybe he saved those the souvenirs,
Speaker 1: and maybe they'll be recreating this one too and issuing
Speaker 1: some more, although I'm sure that wouldn't help those high
Speaker 1: auction prices. So that concludes our tour of historic spirits
Speaker 1: through the ages. We've started with the Chinese Neolithic grog
Speaker 1: and gone all the way to this hotel guest who
Speaker 1: was willing to spend quite a pretty tense on a
Speaker 1: bottle of Scotch, and I like ending on that note.
Speaker 1: I like ending on the the aged alcohol that could
Speaker 1: be enjoyed. It's like almost a different way of appreciating history.
Speaker 1: It certainly is. So if you have any more cool
Speaker 1: alcohol fines you want to suggest to it, I mean,
Speaker 1: there are so many out there. This was a very
Speaker 1: edited list. You can email us where a history podcast
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com. You can also find
Speaker 1: us on Twitter at mist in History, and we are
Speaker 1: on Facebook. And if you want to learn a little
Speaker 1: bit more about spirits, I know, I for one am
Speaker 1: no expert in the area, I have to admit, but
Speaker 1: wine making in particular, we have an article on our
Speaker 1: website called how Wine Making Works, and you can look
Speaker 1: it up by visiting our homepage at www dot how
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