Even the Most Expensive Whiskey in the World Should Be Opened and Enjoyed

Aug 19, 2023

Whiskey is for drinking, not hoarding.

Executive Features Editor, Food & Wine

Matt Taylor-Gross

Regrets, I've had a few, not limited to consuming drugstore sushi, most of my high school class photos, and buying a small quantity of Ethereum (which I regret to inform you is cryptocurrency) in the spring of 2021. Not on the list: drinking every last drop of my bottle of LeNell's Red Hook Rye, which now lists for up to $100,000 on the open market. I would like to state for the record that I did not spend the equivalent of a Porsche 911 on this bottle of whiskey (maybe if I'd picked up that Ethereum back in 2015). But even at the time I bought it — roughly 2008 — that $75 or so I spent on Bottle 5/228 from Barrel 1 was a major stretch for my budget, and definitely more than I'd ever splashed out on booze before. But I wanted to support my friend who owned the coolest, most anarchic liquor shop I'd ever seen, taught me almost every single thing I knew about whiskey, and was delving into bottling the stuff herself.

Matt Taylor-Gross

To hear LeNell Camacho Santa Ana tell it, I was a regular customer at her pioneering Red Hook, Brooklyn bottle shop from pretty much the get-go in 2003, and seeing as I dorked out every time I came in, she offered me a job to which I replied, "You can't afford me." In my recollection, that is true up to the last part of the sentence, because A. I'm not prone to that kind of sass and B. what I imagine I was trying to convey is that the last time I'd worked in a retail shop where they sold something that spoke to my passions (that'd be the HMV record store in Herald Square, kitty-corner from Macy's in the mid '90s) I couldn't actually afford it because I took full and frequent advantage of the employee discount and essentially had to deposit my paycheck right back into the till. Still, she didn't seem to take great offense and I hung on her every bit of wisdom about whiskey in all its forms, as well as life, love, and the importance of not missing a chance to open the good stuff. On a random weekend in the winter of 2008, for instance, she'd busted out a couple of bottles of 1970 Lafite to enjoy alongside a potato-chip-topped squash casserole my husband and I brought over to her loft because that's just how she lives.

Just a few weeks prior to that classy casserole night, LeNell had noticed the vultures beginning to circle. She was several bottlings into her limited Red Hook Rye production, which she'd carefully selected from four barrels of 1984 Willett whiskey and sold exclusively at her namesake shop, when she noticed they were suddenly available via more far-flung channels. From a store newsletter at the time:

Tue, Oct 28, 2008: RED HOOK RYE is about to be featured in TIME OUT NY. However, bottles left number in the teens. I am a f'ing female dog I know, but the price is now $300. I'm just tired of morons trying to pick it up and ebay it as collectible for more than I am selling it at the shop.

Matt Taylor-Gross

Perhaps I should have taken heed and kept it corked, but in the words of John A. Shedd and the ethos of LeNell herself, "A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for." Whiskey is made for sipping, gulping, savoring, and sharing, and I did just that. Not willy-nilly, but to mark occasions over the next few years — a new job, a friend in mourning, being alive. The spirit is fiery, makes its presence known first up the nostrils, then down the hatch. It demands to be paid attention to, and I did every time I cracked it open.

The auction and sale price of the 850-ish bottles of Red Hook Rye has escalated in the years hence, from that initial $75 (maybe it was $100?) to $300 to $20,000 to a penny short of six figures, but it's not like I can't un-drink it. I am left with an empty bottle now and I can't say I have any regrets. Whiskey is for drinking, not hoarding. And Ethereum? Still trying to figure that out.