Expert: Paul Wagner - 5/12/2011

Question
My aunt Flo recently passed away at 102 and we were cleaning out her cabinets and found several bottles of liquor.  We found an unopened bottle of Canadian Club dated 1921, an unopened bottle of Johnny Red from the 1920's and an unopened bottle of prescription whiskey from a pharmacy in East St. Louis Illinois with the box and actual prescription from 1929.  I was just wondering if there is any monetary value for these items.
I can send pictures if anyone is interested.

Answer
Hi Michael

I have both good and bad news for you.  The good news?  This stuff is probably perfectly safe to drink.  Distilled spirits like this are so high in alcohol that they basically don't change over time, especially unopened.

The bad news?  They don't get any better or worse.  Which means that they don't appreciate in value the way some fine wines do.  These would be worth about what a current bottling of similar product sells for in a retail shop.  

But the bottles themselves might actually have more value than the liquor inside.  You could check that out with the nice people at antiquebottles.com. They have a great website just for this kind of thing.

Hope that helps--and I'm sorry I don't have more exciting news for you.

Paul Wagner