The Last Drop: rarest scotch yours from $5500 a bottle
The Last Drop’s whisky starts at $5500 a bottle, but is it worth it?
I never thought I’d find myself writing about the Wu-Tang Clan in a booze column. But the legendary hip-hop group’s latest album has so many parallels with the ultra-luxury spirits market, it’s just irresistible.
The album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, is unique. Literally: there is only one copy in existence. No free digital downloads, no CDs, just a solitary, one-off pressing. And that extreme rarity is extremely valuable: the album sold earlier this year for a record-breaking $US2 million ($2.7m).
Before the sale only snippets of songs from the album had been played publicly. And now it’s in private hands, the rest of the world will possibly never have the pleasure of listening to the work in its entirety.
Which brings me to a whisky I recently had the rare pleasure of tasting.
It was the 1967 Glen Garioch Single Malt Scotch from a company called The Last Drop, founded a few years ago by two spirits-industry veterans who root around in the deep recesses of old distilleries for forgotten barrels of amazing ancient whisky, then bottle them.
A mere 118 bottles of this ultra-rare spirit were filled and only three were shipped to Australia. And they cost $9000 each — not quite $US2m but a lot of money nonetheless.
It’s not the only whisky from The Last Drop available here: you also can buy one of the few bottles of 50 Year Old ($6000) or 48 Year Old Blended Scotch ($5500) to make it to our shores (all are available, on request, through Dan Murphy’s, believe it or not).
When I heard about these impossibly exclusive spirits I felt it was my professional duty to ask the nice PR people for tasting samples. And, remarkably, they obliged. Which is how I became one of only a handful of Australians who will ever try The Last Drop whiskies, like the privileged few who attended a pre-sale preview of segments from the Wu-Tang Clan album.
The sample bottles turned out to be — perhaps not surprisingly — tiny. Barely a mouthful of each. But enough to be suitably impressed.
The 50 Year Old in particular is extraordinary: a haunting explosion of smoked leather perfume and rich woody bass notes and sweet strong molasses.
And as I lay there, open mouthed, up-ending each tiny sample bottle over my tongue, willing the last drop to fall (at more than eight bucks a millilitre, I wasn’t going to let any go to waste), I ruminated on why ultra-rare spirits such as these have become such a big thing in recent years.
The Wu-Tang Clan’s release of a truly unique (and, therefore, truly valuable) album is, in part, a reaction to the devaluation of music through digitisation and free downloads.
And limited bottlings of old, precious and truly irreplaceable spirits are also, in part, a reaction to the proliferation of faux-exclusive, manufactured luxury brands that crowd the shelves of every duty-free bottle shop in every airport in the world.
They also taste amazing. But you’ll probably have to take my word for that.