A bottle of Old Rip Van Winkle 25 Year Old 1989 sold for $37,500
The star of the show was a bottle of LeNell’s Red Hook Rye 23 Year Old Barrel #1, which sold for $56,250 (£44,814).
That smashed the estimate of $20,000 to $30,000 at Sotheby’s ‘Festive Spirits and American Classics’ auction in the Big Apple.
LeNell Camacho Santa Ana owned a specialist spirits store in the Red Hook area of Brooklyn back in the 2000s.
She regularly embarked upon buying trips to Kentucky, and one of her excursions saw her land four barrels of rye that had been distilled at Bernheim Distillery in Louisville in the early 1980s.
It was used to create LeNell’s Red Hook Rye, which has emerged as one of the most distinctive and sought-after rye bottlings of all time. The 23 Year Old Barrel #1 was signed by Camacho Santa Ana.
Zev Glesta, spirits specialist at Sotheby’s, said it had secured some of the ‘rarest whiskeys that only surface once in a blue moon’ for the auction.
A bottle of Rathskeller Rye 136 Proof 1983 shattered its target of $18,000 to $24,000 by fetching $37,500 (£29,876).
The 24-year-old rye was commissioned by the Seelbach, Louisville’s grandest hotel, in 2007 to commemorate the building’s rich history.
Another highlight was a bottle of D.H. Cromwell 15 Year Old, which sold for $30,000 (£23,900) – $10,000 higher than the upper estimate.
It is one of just 72 bottles of this whiskey, which was produced by Julian ‘Pappy’ Van Winkle
