The World's Oldest Bourbon Was Once Owned By A Historic Celebrity

The world of bourbon extends far beyond a tasty spirit people like to drink. It's full of bottles that exist in extremely limited quantities or have any number of intriguing stories or unique processes behind them. Seasoned connoisseurs seek to collect the rarest of bourbons. Often, the conversation revolves around history's most expensive bourbon bottles — currently, that record is held by a bottle of Macallan Valerio Adami 1926 60 year old, sold by auction house Sotheby's in London in 2023 for $2.7 million. But a good story is far more interesting than a high price tag. Case in point: the world's oldest known bottle of bourbon whiskey, The Olde Ingledew Whiskey. In 2021, it went for $137,000 at auction house Skinner, but its background is priceless.

This bourbon has it all: centuries of life in a bottle, mysterious origins and present-day whereabouts, and, for a stretch, a historic celebrity owner. Skinner appraisers tested and carbon-dated the bottle when it first came to them, identifying the liquid as bourbon that was produced somewhere between 1763 and 1803. It was bottled in the 1860s by Evans & Ragland in LaGrange, Georgia, and made its way into the cellars of none other than banking titan John Pierpont Morgan. But how did it end up at an auction house in 2021?

This particular bottle was unearthed by a man named Rex Woolbright when he was going through the estate of his late uncle Logan Drake in Newberry, South Carolina. Woolbright went on to research what this whiskey was and found a 1978 newspaper article from the bourbon's hometown, LaGrange. That's where he learned the bottle's original owner was Morgan, who lived from 1837 to 1913. The famous banker had bought three bottles of The Olde Ingledew while visiting Georgia, where he had property. His son inherited the bottles upon his death, and, over the years, gifted all of them out to some pretty important people. Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt received one, as did Harry S. Truman. James Byrnes got the third; Byrnes' impressive resume included being a senator, a congressman, a Supreme Court justice, and the governor of South Carolina. At some point, Byrnes passed the gift of bourbon along to his friend Francis Drake. It remained in the Drake home for Woolbright to find decades later.

When this third bottle that had passed from Evans & Ragland to Morgan to Byrnes to Drake finally sold at Skinner, the buyer chose to remain anonymous. So, for the first time in this bourbon's history, its owner and whereabouts are a mystery. While you can learn to track rare bourbon bottles with the best of them, chances are you won't find this pedigreed bottle, but we can all enjoy its story.