The World’s Most Expensive Bottles Of Booze.

The first thing you should do when sampling the finest alcohol known to man is just be super-careful. No loose clothing; no wild gesticulations; no palate-trashing trips to Maccie D’s beforehand; and no tempting the devil, like Mr Salvatore Calabrese did at the Playboy Club in Mayfair, London, one summer night in 2012.

The august bartender was all set to break the world record for the most expensive cocktail ever: a £5,500 sip known as “Salvatore’s Legacy”. He had ranged around his own cellar (estimated at £1 million), selecting a bottle of pre-Napoleonic 1788 Clos de Griffier Vieux cognac (worth £50,000) to use as the base. He intended to mix this with Kümmel liqueur from 1770 and some orange curaçao from 1860 in a 2:1:1 ratio, with a few drops of 19th-century Angostura bitters. On the night of the grand pour, a curious Playboy club member ordered a couple of shots of the brandy – at £5,500 a measure – and asked to inspect the label. And then he stood up, accidentally elbowing the bottle off the table, whereupon it smashed into pieces and its 224-year-old contents seeped into the floor. “I’ve been heartbroken,” said Mr Calabrese. “Not because of the value of the bottle, but because it is a piece of history that has been lost.” Playboys, eh? (Thankfully, a second attempt at the record a few months later was successful.)

Still, the customer wasn’t dumb to ask to inspect the bottle. A former wine waiter on the QE2 once told me it was a common practice to decant a mid-range South African red into empty Château Lafite Rothschild bottles, add a little Ribena and gravy browning and pass it off as the real thing. Domaine de la Romanée-Conti – the most storied burgundy in the world, average price per bottle £11,602 – is a particular favourite among counterfeiters. So do try to buy from a reputable auction house. In 2014, Sotheby’s sold a 114-bottle lot of DRC for HK$12.6 million ($1.6 million).

And would I actually be able to tell the difference, us non-connoisseurs might wonder? I’d like to think I could tell a £5 bottle from a £50 Pomerol. But could I tell a £500 bottle from a £5,000 bottle? Or a £192,000 bottle? (That would be the 6l Cheval-Blanc St Emilion from 1947, the most expensive single bottle ever sold at auction.) Mr Douglas Blyde, elite cellar consultant and ES Magazine drinks columnist, is reassuring: “I’ve done so many blind tastings over the years, inserting fine wines covertly, and it does seem people can always identify those wines with more work lavished upon them versus cheaper mass market or junk food wines.” Moreover, his opinion is that wine is often more dependent on company, context and bonhomie than intrinsic value.

“Markedly fine red Bordeaux from a classic year often punishes the impatient person who opens it too young with a mouthful of unreconciled, tarty oak and tongue-furring, stewed black tea like tannins,” says Mr Blyde. “Expensive red Burgundy meanwhile is nearly always disappointing, leading the collector to feel self-hatred for apologising for the wine’s faults regardless of when the cork is plucked. Top Californian reds are nearly always raucously sexy to consume at any stage of their life, but can be vertigo-inducing in their pricing.”

Once you consult the record books, you encounter two types of incredibly expensive booze, the first being expensive booze that is expensive because of extra-booze factors. This stuff isn’t too hard to find. A champagne called “Goût de Diamants” once went for £1.2 million – but that’s because it’s encrusted in diamonds. The most expensive bottle of spirits ever sold went for £2.7 million – Ley .925’s tequila, Pasion Azteca – but this again was diamond-related. It ought to be pointed out that if you were to filter Mountain Dew through emerald dust, have Rihanna stir it with a narwhal’s tusk and deliver it in a goblet of solid gold, it would still be Mountain Dew.

The interesting stuff – to booze hounds, at least – is the second category, where the value comes from age and rarity and hopefully pure deliciousness of the liquid itself. Thus, a single bottle of the legendary 1907 Heidsieck & Co Monopole Diamant Bleu champagne rescued from a torpedoed Swedish freighter ship bound for Tsar Nicholas II of Russia in 1916 has gone on sale for around £163,000 at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow. Apparently, the cellar conditions deep in the Finnish gulf were pretty good; one lucky taster described “gunflint and black rifle powder mixed with a briny note like roasted oysters… graham cracker… massive flavours of caramelised bananas, burnt citrus and kerosene”. The most expensive individual bottle of alcohol ever sold was a specially produced scotch: a six-litre decanter of Macallan’s “M”, which went for $628,000 (then £381,620) in Hong Kong in 2014. The Dalmore distillery recently released the Paterson Collection, in honour of their master blender, Mr Richard Paterson. The 12 bottles, distilled from 1926 up until the 1990s, went on sale for $1.2 million direct from Dalmore. And earlier this year, a single bottle of 52-year-old Karuizawa 1960 Japanese whisky went for £100,100 (US$128,000) at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong.

Mr Ryan Chetiyawardana, all-round bartending genius at London’s Dandelyan (and others), has been developing a case for this stuff. “I’ve tried a few Dalmores in the £60,000 bracket. A few Macallans at that level, too. I also emptied quite a lot of Karuizawa before it was crazy expensive. But what’s most interesting to me is the stuff that’s from a completely different era. Friends who aren’t in the industry often say: is it worth it? My answer is unequivocally: yes. I’m not someone who can nip down to [London wine shop] Hedonism Wines and pick a pre-phylloxera cognac for a Friday night. But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be worth it.” (Last year, a bottle of Massougnes 1801 Cognac was sold to “a buyer in the Far East” by Hedonism Wines for a reported £222,000-plus.)

What precisely are you getting that you’re not getting in a mere £10,000 bottling? “Time is such an intangible thing… It’s our most valuable asset,” says Mr Chetiyawardana. He has spent a long time in laboratories trying to pinpoint the tastes of the “really hallowed” old scotches. “There were barley varietals that aren’t around anymore. There were different yeasts. They were made for love not money, distilled in a slower manner, with slower fermentations. And the length of times they’ve sat in barrels creates flavours that aren’t apparent in modern products. You end up with something with such concentration and intensity. One of the fascinating notes is tropical fruit. Guavas, mangos, pineapples, papayas, but more concentrated than they are in the actual fruit. That’s married with a florality: white blossom, yellow flowers, lots of fleeting aromas. But it’s also a pleasure/pain thing – it can’t be too pure, there’s an underlying fug of leather, mushroom, forest floor, your classic rancio notes. It’s decay.”

The bottles that are most prized by collectors are those that won’t ever exist again: pre-ban absinthes (made before the spirit was banned in France for its supposedly hallucinogenic qualities in 1915); pre-revolutionary Cuban rums; Irish whiskeys from defunct distilleries. Mr Edgar Harden of the Old Spirits Company is a former Christie’s wine expert who switched to spirits after he discovered a cache of old Gordon’s gin at an estate. He now supplies old bottles to bars and private collectors and once mixed me a 1970s negroni. He recently surveyed his customers and found about 90 per cent of what he sold gets drunk. “If you took it down to just private collectors, I reckon it would be more like 60-70 per cent. A lot of them like to look at it.”

He identifies the three “big” categories as old scotch, old Japanese whiskey, and old cognac. “This is where your money will be well spent on bona fide old juice.” What about the rest? Bourbon doesn’t tend to scale these heights, but there was a case of Old Overholt rye whiskey made especially for the distillery’s owner, secretary of the US Treasury Andrew Mellon, back before Prohibition. That went for $17,150 at Christie’s in New York. Gin is much cheaper. “The most expensive gin would probably have been an old bottle and it would probably have been something sold by me… but nobody would be aware of that. You can get up to a grand or so for a very rare late-19th century London dry gin or a major old tom.” Irish whiskey is creeping up, and he knows of a 1720 madeira that sold for £20,000.

But some of the most exciting finds are rum. “Old rum achieves big prices but there just isn’t much of it around. Occasionally you’ll find a bottle of late-18th century Jamaican rum in the cellar of an old country house that was made by the family who owned the estate at around the time they got their title. That might go for about £6,500 to £7,500.” Recently, 12 bottles of rum from the Harewood House estate were cleaned of 235 years of grime and dust and sold for £78,255 at Christie’s in London. Mr Mark Lascelles, brother of the eighth Earl of Harewood, who owns the house, said: “I had always known the bottles were down there, but I wouldn’t have given them another look.”

But perhaps the most covetable collectible is chartreuse, the legendary French liqueur distilled by Carthusian monks. Christie’s in Geneva is a particular specialist here, recently selling an ultra-rare 19th-century chartreuse blanche for about £20,000. “Old chartreuse is one of the most sensational things,” says Mr Chetiyawardana. The modern ones are herbal, but the older ones are more like walking into an Indian spice market. It may be that the greener notes have faded away or it may be that it was just a completely different product back then. The intensity is unreal. You wake up tasting it the next morning.”

So: start saving up.