Dusty Booze with Aaron Goldfarb

Featured Thought Experiment: Vintage Cocktails

This episode’s featured cocktail is…well, it’s not a cocktail at all. In fact, it’s not even a beverage. It’s a tall, frosty, delicious thought experiment prompted by Aaron’s Book.

As we know, this book is all about rare and vintage spirits, and these bottles tend to come with a pretty hefty price tag associated with them. Like, think multiple hundreds of dollars on the low end and multiple tens of thousands of dollars on the high end. And in one respect, that’s fair. Virtually all dusty bottles are no longer in production, placing these spirits in the extreme long tail of the supply and demand bell curve.

So my question to you–my thought experiment– is this:

If you wanted to make a cocktail that was originally created using a vintage spirit that’s been out of production for decades, how important to you (how meaningful) would it be to taste that drink using the original ingredient? And, perhaps as a little rider on this thought experiment, how much would you pay for that privilege?

A prime example of this is Trader Vic’s original Mai Tai, made using Wray & Nephew 17 year old rum. Currently, there are only three bottles known to exist (one of them in the possession of Martin Cate of Smuggler’s Cove), and my guess is that you’d probably have a hard time convincing the owners to crack one open just so you could taste a genuine original Trader Vic’s Mai Tai.

To understand why this rum is so valuable, we need to go back in history to Prohibition, which encouraged Caribbean rum producers to age their rum longer than they might have otherwise. Less demand…why not leave it in the barrel for an extra couple years. So coming out of Prohibition, when Tiki bars really took off in popularity, there was a glut of long-aged rum on the market, making it affordable enough for mixing.

Unfortunately, the original 1944 Mai Tai didn’t survive long. According to Goldfarb [quote]: “The Mai Tai […] became so popular that Trader Vic burned through Wray & Nephew’s aged stocks, selling the cocktail faster than it could produce and age the rum. Bergeron (that’s Trader Vic) would eventually be forced to swap in a 15 year old before he started stretching that out by adding Red Heart and Coruba Rum, more affordable and lightly aged Jamaican dark rums. Eventually, he began to use a dark rum from Martinique.” [End Quote]

Now, was Wray & Nephew 17 year so great in the original Mai Tai because it was so smooth and mellow, or because it was a fruity ester bomb? According to some rum scholars, it’s kinda hard to tell…which is exactly what makes the notion of cracking one of these bottles so tantalizing. It would likely unlock, in an embodied, sensory manner, a truth about the Mai Tai so pure that it would change the way we think about the drink.

So I ask you again…how important is it to understand what an original 1944 Mai Tai tasted like? How much would you pay for a dram from one of the scant few bottles in existence?

You can run this thought experiment for other cocktails like the Brooklyn (made using Amer Picon) and the Vesper (made with Kina Lillet), and I like it because it makes you grapple with big questions about identity and authenticity and value and flavor…but at the end of the day, there’s still that uncrossable chasm between what once was and what’s currently available.