John Heider | hometownlife.com
There isn’t a single brand of bourbon surrounded by more hype than the Pappy Van Winkle line, and you’ll usually have to shell out at least four figures to secure a bottle if you come across one in the wild. However, those lofty prices seem downright reasonable compared to the record-breaking sum that a rare bottle produced by the distillery fetched after hitting the auction block.
There’s plenty of evidence that suggests the bourbon boom that began around 15 years ago has come to an end. Prices for fairly common bottles have started to stabilize over the past couple of years, although the same can’t really be said for the so-called “unicorns” that are still a very hot commodity among whiskey aficionados.
No distiller comes close to matching the prestige of Buffalo Trace, which still manages to whip bourbon drinkers into a frenzy with the annual release of its Antique Collection in addition to the line widely viewed as the holy grail of American whiskey: Pappy Van Winkle.
The Van Winkle family is essentially royalty in Kentucky due to a whiskey lineage that stretches back to the end of the 19th century, and Buffalo Trace has been responsible for producing 15, 20, and 23-year expressions of Pappy Van Winkle since 2002 (as well as the 10-year-old Old Rip Van Winkle, 12-year Van Winkle Special Reserve “Lot B,” and 13-year Van Winkle Family Reserve rye that don’t technically fall under the “Pappy” umbrella but are still inextricably linked to the brand).
You’d never have to shell out more than $500 for the oldest bottle of Pappy if every store that sells it adhered to the MSRP, but that’s virtually never the case in a world where you’ll usually need to fork over thousands of dollars to acquire one for yourself.
That brings us to the bottle of Old Rip Van Winkle that was whipped up for a charity auction in 2007 in order to raise funds for the Oscar Getz Museum of Bourbon History in Kentucky.
According to Robb Report, Julian Van Winkle III was personally responsible for blending together bourbons that were produced at the hallowed Stitzel-Weller distillery before being aged for 15 to 20 years to create a whiskey that was bottled at 125.6 proof. It’s unclear what it initially fetched close to 20 years ago, but the person who bought it declined to pop it open.
It subsequently ended up at an auction that was recently organized by Sotheby’s, where it was expected to sell for between $30,000 and $50,000.
However, it soared past that estimate courtesy of the bidding war that ultimately drove the price up to $125,000—making it the most expensive post-Prohibition American whiskey ever sold (the record was previously set by a Van Winkle 18-year-old that fetched $107,715 last November).
If you’re curious, a 30-year-old Irish whiskey technically set the record for the most expensive bottle ever sold when it fetched $2.8 million in 2024, although the price was driven up by the package that also featured a Fabergé egg and a 22-karat gold watch.