WINDFALL

 

Not fruit but I do sometimes collect wind-fallen lemons from the neighbours on one side, avocados from neighbours on the other side and feijoas from our trees up the back but here I'm talking about selling spirits at auction.

I was looking in the liquor cupboard a few weeks ago and thought that I'd get rid of a few of the old bottles of spirits we have. I've had some of these for nearly 40 years and some of them have never been opened. I had intended to drink or sell them over the years but never got around to it. When we packed up to go to Canada in 2013 I put a lot of old wines in Fitzgerald auction and got some good prices for them. I also sold a bottle of The Macallan 1950 malt and got $2500 for it.

I bought that in 1982 for $100 so it was a pretty good return.

The various other things - ports, bottles of old vodka, whisky, cognacs and liqueurs we stored with our other household possessions. At some stage during storage one of the boxes fell and some items were broken I wrote a pst about this: CAC

Murphy's Law of course dictated that only the more expensive and unopened bottles were broken.

The Royal Household Scotch, circa 1940s would have fetched between a couple of thousand dollars at auction and the Macleay Duff Antique about $500. The Munro's King of Kings was also broken. I'm glad that I'd sold the The Macallan and not stored it.

Over the last few years we've opened and drunk some of the old spirits including another bottle of the Macleay Duff Antique, a couple of Long John Macdonald Scotch, 1940s vodka and some other old cognacs.

As we don't drink a lot of spirits anymore and the last of the old bottles were gathering dust I put them into Webb's on-line auction. Four bottles sold straight away:

Munro King of Kings $220

Remy Martin Club Cognac $150

Haig's Dimple Scotch $100

Long John MacDonald 21 y.o.  Scotch $190

Total $660 less commission, insurance  and GST still netted over $500.

This wasn't bad as I'd been given the Cognac as a sample in the 1980s and the Munro, Macdonald and Haig's I bought at auction when The Distiller's Company were quitting all of their stocks in about 1990. I paid about $10 for each of these.

I also submitted two other old scotches - a bottle of Ushers Extra (circa 1940s) and The Mill Burn Malt (circa 1950s). Webb's put a reserve of $400 on the Usher's and $350 on The Mill Burn but as the Usher's label is damaged and The Mill Burn unknown (the distillery closed down over 40 years ago) there were no takers. I'll send in some other old bottles (port and maybe some cognac) and ask them to relist those Scotches at a reduced price. They cost me nothing as they were unearthed when we were excavating a cellar in an old wine and spirits operation I managed in the 1980s.

So - a windfall - as opposed to that other fall when the box of whiskies fell down in storage.  This will go toward the price of a new smartphone that The Old Girl wants.

Slainthe!