Bringing back bottles the world has forgotten about
Closed distilleries and private cellars.
Grand Cellar Spirits
Enter the Vault
Everything we hold, filed by origin and by category.
Every lot arrives with its record
Fill level, capsule condition, cellar history and chain of ownership, photographed and written down before a bottle is listed.
Own the bottle. Choose the night.
It ships double walled the moment you ask, or waits in bond under your name until the occasion arrives. The decision is yours; the bottle already is.
Currently in the vault
One from each origin
The rarest thing on each of the eight shelves, and the bottling that origin is actually known for. Prices are what we last traded them at.
Lot 041
Lot 052
Lot 088
Lot 049
Lot 017
Lot 061
Lot 112
Lot 012What the collection covers
One thousand four hundred and twelve lots, across five categories. Some are single bottles. Some are the last case anyone can find.
Rare whisky and scotch
612 lots
Vintage wine and champagne
304 lots
Cognac and armagnac
188 lots
Vintage vodka
141 lots
Rare rum and agave
167 lots
Where it comes from
Eleven origins have a shelf of their own. Pick one to see what is held, what it is worth, and what that country is actually good for.
Or by what it is
The same shelves cut the other way. Every piece we can send today, filed by what you would actually call it rather than by where it was made.
How the trade got here
27 turns across the eight origins, from the first staked vines to the last country to start distilling again. None of it is our invention; all of it is why the vault holds what it holds.
- 800 BCItaly
The land of vines
Greek colonists plant staked vines across the south and call the country Oenotria. Fermentation in Europe starts here, long before anyone thinks to distil it.
- 600 BCFrance
Vines reach Gaul
Phocaean Greeks found Massalia on the Mediterranean coast and bring vines with them. The Romans carry the practice north over the next few centuries.
- 8th centuryJapan
Brewing with a mould
The Harima fudoki describes sake made with koji, a mould grown on steamed rice that converts starch to sugar while fermentation is already running.
- 10th centuryRussia
Rye enters the record
Kvass, fermented from rye bread, appears in the chronicles. Grain, not fruit, is the base of everything Russia will later distil.
- 12th centuryItaly
Distillation is written down
The medical school at Salerno writes down how to distil wine. For the next few hundred years spirits are a remedy rather than a pleasure.
- 1200sSouth Korea
Distilling crosses Asia
Distilling arrives with the Mongol campaigns, carried east from Persia. Kaesong, Andong and Jeju become the centres, and near Kaesong soju still carries the Arabic root of its name.
- 1310France
The first brandy record
A prior at Eauze sets down forty virtues of the local eau de vie, which makes armagnac one of the earliest documented brandies anywhere in Europe.
- 15th centuryEngland
Hops change brewing
Hopped beer arrives from the Low Countries and is resisted for a generation before it wins, because hops keep a barrel sound far longer than unhopped ale.
- 15th centuryRussia
Bread wine
Bread wine, distilled from a rye mash, is being made around Moscow. The category is defined from the start by stripping flavour out rather than building it in.
- 1494Scotland
Malt to Friar John Cor
The Exchequer Rolls note eight bolls of malt sent to Friar John Cor to make aqua vitae. It is the first written evidence of Scotch, and the trade is already established enough to tax.
- 1559Japan
A complaint in the woodwork
Carpenters working on a shrine in Kagoshima scratch a complaint into the woodwork that the priest was too mean to give them any shochu. It is the earliest written mention of the drink.
- 1575Netherlands
Bols starts distilling
Lucas Bols begins distilling in Amsterdam, at the start of the Dutch trade that will supply half of Europe.
- 1600sNetherlands
Burnt wine builds Cognac
Dutch merchants buy wine boiled down for the voyage home and call it brandewijn. Demand from that trade is what turns Cognac and Armagnac from local practice into industries.
- 1690England
Gin is let loose
The Distilling Act opens grain spirit to anyone who wants to make it, favouring domestic distillers over French brandy. The gin trade and the disorder that follows both begin here.
- 1786Italy
Vermouth is formalised
Antonio Benedetto Carpano begins selling a fortified, aromatised wine over the counter in Turin, and vermouth becomes a defined commercial category.
- 1823Scotland
Scotch goes legitimate
The Excise Act makes a licence affordable enough to be worth holding. Most illicit distilling ends, and nearly every distillery still working dates its continuous life from here.
- 1830The trade at large
The continuous still
Aeneas Coffey patents the continuous column still. Grain spirit can suddenly be made cheaply and at volume, which is what makes blended whisky, and the modern industry, possible.
- 1863France
Phylloxera
Phylloxera reaches French vines and destroys much of the wine and brandy trade over the following decades. Cognac never fully recovers its position, and Scotch takes the ground it loses.
- 1880sNetherlands
Schiedam at its height
Schiedam works hundreds of malt wine distilleries at once, and jenever is at its peak before gin and the column still take the market from it.
- 1894Russia
The vodka monopoly
The state takes distilling into monopoly. It is why so much surviving Russian stock carries a state bottling mark rather than a producer's name.
- 1909South Korea
Home brewing is licensed away
A colonial liquor tax law licenses brewing and pushes it out of the home, and a great many regional Korean rice wine traditions do not survive the century.
- 1920The trade at large
Prohibition
The United States goes dry for thirteen years. Export trades reroute around it, some distilleries never reopen, and the shape of the modern spirits market is set by who survived.
- 1923Japan
Yamazaki is built
Masataka Taketsuru returns from studying distilling in Scotland and the first Japanese malt distillery is built at Yamazaki, beginning a category that now outprices its teacher.
- 1965South Korea
Grain soju is banned
With rice short, distilling soju from grain is banned outright and the industry moves to diluted ethanol. Anything made before this is why the Korean shelf is so thin.
- 1983Scotland
The distilleries go silent
A glut and collapsing demand close a wave of distilleries in a single year. Those closures created almost everything this vault now calls rare.
- 1999South Korea
Korea distils grain again
The grain distilling ban is fully lifted and small regional makers begin again, thirty four years after the tradition was interrupted.
- 2006England
England distils again
The first English malt distillery in over a century opens in Norfolk, which is why an English malt is decades younger than its Scottish neighbours and priced accordingly.