Quite some time ago
I posted an article about labels. It was titled simply, "Paper".
Toward the front of
the article I wrote "Back in the late 1960's, just as whiskey collecting was
emerging from it's infancy, labeled bottles were still somewhat available. Not
plentiful, but we certainly saw a great deal more "back in the day",
than we do now. Sadly though, most collectors were either scraping or soaking
off the paper labels so that the bottles would display better in a sunlit
window or a lighted display case. So much for history..."
I got an email from a fellow collector last night. It was a combination of
Show and Tell, and guess what I found. Seems that a non-collector had gone to
an estate sale and found a neat old bottle. Darned if it didn't still have the
original cork and label in place. Well, that dirty old label had to go. And as
long as he was at it, might as well get rid of that nasty old cork and get rid
of what was left of the smelly old contents. All the better to see the pretty
glass...
All cleaned up, it shined like a new penny. And you could really see the embossing, now that the dirty label and the cork with the antlers printed on it was gone.
This part of the west has been noted for the abundance of western whiskies
with antlers in the embossing. OK, so the cats out of the bag; it was indeed a
J. Moore.
But not just any ol' J. Moore like this one~
And so, our fellow collector bought the shiny bottle . That's when he sent me a photo of the label that had been unceremoniously
scraped (not soaked) off the bottle. Oh my...
Followed by a photo of the bottle, sans the cork and the label... with the crooked neck and spillover dripping nearly a half inch down the neck. It's a brilliant yellowish old amber that's so light that you can read a newspaper through.
No comments:
Post a Comment