The Contents of This 230-Year-Old Bottle Stumped Experts. Can You Unravel the Mystery?

When William J. LaGamma found himself in the wine cellar of a Westchester County mansion estate sale, he wasn't sure what he would find—but knew it'd be old.

“[It] was one of those damp, dark, musty-smelling concrete rooms," he said. "Ancient, with a large, heavy door that was stuck open, wooden with heavy metal latches. Edgar Allan Poe-like.”

LaGamma is an antique dealer who sets up Sundays at a flea market in Chelsea. He sells artwork, watches and jewelry, tin toys, vintage clothing, and other collectibles. He has a great passion for things from the past, which he spends most of his time trying to acquire. 

He found himself deep in the wine cellar, surrounded by decrepit shelves, some full of dusty bottles. Unfortunately, other antique hunters beat him there and were snatching bottles like crazy.

“There weren’t many full bottles left so I just grabbed what I could, carefully selecting the best bottles I saw, which were only two,” LaGamma said.

One was a 150-year-old Bordeaux, a nice find. But the other was puzzling—an old bottle that read: "Sazerac 1795."

A few days later, back at home on City Island in The Bronx, LaGamma stopped by his regular dining spot, Archie’s Tap and Table. LaGamma goes to Archie’s two or three times per week, frequently ordering the oldest bottles of wine on the restaurant’s list. This time, he brought the bottle along to show the restaurant's owner and operator, Alex Pertsovsky.

“He had no idea what Sazerac was," said Pertsovsky. "He knew the cocktail, but he didn’t know that it was actually a company."

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Pertsovsky started living and working on City Island 15 years prior. The Culinary Institute of America-trained proprietor opened Archie's in the summer of 2015 after years spent cheffing for famous New York City restaurants owned by Jean-Georges Vongerichten.

Situated amongst a slew of fishing village-type restaurants with names like Tony’s Pier, Sammy’s Shrimp Box, and The Original Crab Shanty, Pertsovsky initially envisioned Archie's as a fine-dining restaurant. Perhaps, he thought, it'd become the first Bronx restaurant to garner a Michelin star. Instead, he opted for a relaxed neighborhood joint befitting the tight-knit local community.

Pertsovsky also wanted to curate the best whiskey list in the Bronx. Ever since he first tasted Maker’s Mark nearly two decades ago, he put his beloved Russian vodka aside for good.

Pertsovsky built a personal collection, mainly bourbons with a few ryes, but he never reached for the overpriced rarities that flooded the scene at the time. Three years ago, when he started the whiskey program at Archie’s, he kept the same ethos. Nothing vintage or rare; just classics.

But, now that LaGamma held a potentially vintage whiskey right in front of him, Pertrovsky's interest was piqued. So he told LaGamma all about Sazerac.

The Sazerac Company is a privately held alcohol conglomerate with properties including the Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort, KY, the Barton Distillery in Bardstown, KY, the Sazerac House in New Orleans, LA, and the Domaine Sazerac de Segonzac Cognac estate and distillery in France.

Pertsovksy told LaGamma that Sazerac might want to hear about the bottle, as it was likely an important piece of the company's history. But LaGamma just wanted to sell it. After a brief negotiation, LaGamma pawned it off to Pertsovsky for $350.

There are only three states and one city that allow bar owners to legally sell vintage spirits to customers: North Carolina, Kentucky, New York, and Washington D.C. But Pertsovsky didn’t want to sell the stuff to patrons. He considered drinking it himself.

For the time being, he figured it would be a cool piece to put on his back bar. Yet, when he set the Sazerac bottle down on the counter, something felt off.

“It didn’t have that same sound that all the modern bottles have, with that three inches of glass at the bottom," he said. "It made a different ping, a different pitch."

It didn't even sit level on the bar. "It was a little crooked," he said. "That, to me, suggested that it was hand-blown."

Upon further inspection, Pertsovsky noticed something even stranger—the label didn't mention the spirit inside.

City Island might be the most far-flung place in New York City. Cut off from the mainland Bronx by Pelham Bay Park, the largest in the city, it’s not exactly easy for most New Yorkers to reach. Coming from South Brooklyn, my choices seemed to be an hour drive through bad traffic, $125 Uber, or taking the F train to the 6 train to the Bx29 bus. Luckily, Pertsovsky clued me onto a fourth option: taking the Metro North to Pelham and having him pick me up in his car.

It was an unusually warm Tuesday in late October when Pertsovsky unlocked his empty restaurant and showed me to the bar. The bottle of Sazerac sat uneven on top. Lacking a seam, it was surely hand-blown. The wax seal around the cap was still mostly intact, stamped with an impression that may have authenticated it. And the liquid inside was past the shoulder, a great fill level for something so old. The dust on it had almost melded into the brown glass, laminating the lithograph label onto it, which read "Sazerac 1795." at the top, crosscut diagonally by "ALL CORKS STAMPED" in red.

The Sazerac de Forge family started growing grapes and distilling Cognac in France as early as the 1630s. In 1782, Bernard Sazerac de Forge founded the Cognac House that bears the family name, which brought together several different vineyards and distilleries under one brand. The new company named its flagship release Sazerac de Forge & Fils. It hit the U.S. market that same year, starting with New York City.

That's not the Sazerac brand American whiskey connoisseurs are familiar with today, however. That company was founded in 1869, when sales clerk Thomas H. Handy co-purchased the Sazerac Coffee House in New Orleans, which was founded in 1850. The coffee house was named after the Sazerac cocktail, which, allegedly, initially included Sazerac de Forge & Fils as its key ingredient. The inventor of this mid-1800s cocktail was a New Orleans pharmacist named Antoine Amédée Peychaud, whose namesake bitters are still on shelves today.

Peychaud just so happens to have been born in 1795. Could that have been what the date on the bottle meant? Surely not, in my opinion, as putting a cocktail inventor’s birth year on a bottle is unusual.

Of course, the name Sazerac makes contemporary drinkers think of rye, both as the key ingredient in today’s version of the Sazerac cocktail, as well as in the brand name Sazerac Rye, which has been produced in Kentucky since 2006.

But, because Pertsovsky had never opened the bottle, we didn't actually know what was inside. Was it rye? Or was it bourbon? After all, with the advent of the steamboat, bourbon was being sent down the river to New Orleans as early as the 1820s. Or could this bottle have been Sazerac de Forge & Fils Cognac that was distilled or bottled in 1795?

Luckily, the label's next line provided another clue: Acker, Merrall, & Condit.

Acker, Merrall, & Condit was founded as a package store under a different name in 1820. It took the name Acker, Merrall, & Company by 1858 before Condit was tacked on in 1868. By the turn of the century, the group had high-end grocery stores throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. These stores sold specialty foods, coffees, teas, mustards, pickles, as well as luxuries such as fine cigars and “rare old wines.”

The company brought many of those spirits back to the U.S. through a purchasing agency it opened in Paris in 1865. The largest of the Acker stores opened on West 42nd Street in 1894. That address is listed on the old Sazerac bottle in a prominent position, toward the bottom of the label. To me, that meant the bottle was no older than 1894. Before the Bottled in Bond Act of 1897, it wasn’t unusual for a distillery to sell a barrel to a store like Acker for it to be bottled in-house.

“Perhaps it was a promotional item, meant to announce the opening of their newest location,” said Pertsovsky, speculating. Unfortunately, that didn't bring us any closer to finding out what might be inside.

“The type of artifact I’m used to dealing with is dirty, broken, usually empty,” said Nicolas Laracuente, a professional archeologist who became lead archivist of the Sazerac Company Archives in 2021.

Its current collection has over 400,000 artifacts, including many full bottles from the past that have come from various Sazerac properties.

Even with shelves upon shelves of bottles from the past, Laracuente had never encountered one like Pertsovsky’s. He did think it looked fairly similar to what Sazerac Cognac was producing in the mid-1800s, though, especially based on the type of lithograph label used. But there was no guarantee.

“They were doing Champagne, wine, and many other things at the time,” he said.

The oldest liquid Sazerac currently has in its archives has a plain label that reads “fine Champagne” on the bottom right. The distinction refers to Cognac that's made from at least 50 percent Grand Champagne region grapes; the remaining grapes come from the Petite Champagne region. The bottle's neck label claims it's aged for 75 years, placing its distillation date around the 1790s.

Laracuente thought this latest Sazerac find could have, in fact, been distilled in 1795, putting it close to the archive's oldest bottle. Even if it was bottled in 1894, the year the West 42nd Street location of Acker, Merrall, & Condit opened, that would date the liquid inside as nearly 100 years old.

Massive age statements are all the rage today. But would a Cognac house really have bottled century-old liquid in the late 19th century? Surprisingly, yes.

In fact, it’s not that hard to find examples from the past. A 2021 Cognac auction featured five extremely old bottles of a similar quality: 1777 Cognac distilled at Domaine de la Vie and bottled in 1936. The lot sold for £40,500, roughly $50,700.

For this Sazerac bottle to have been distilled in 1795, then bottled by 1894 made some sense, actually. In the early 1870s, French vineyards were infected by microscopic sap-sucking aphids called phylloxera that destroyed most of the grapes, including the Folle Blanche and Colombard varieties in the Cognac region, some of which had originally been planted by the Romans. This radically changed both the Cognac industry and alcohol consumption in the United States.

In the latter case, many cocktails—such as, perhaps, the Sazerac—would swap out Cognac in favor of rye whiskey, which was now being distilled on America's East Coast.

Of course, despite the phylloxera, France still had plenty of old Cognac casks aging that would eventually need to be bottled and sold.

Was it possible that, like Coca-Cola today, Sazerac was a brand so famous in 19th century New York that there was no need to describe what the liquid inside actually was?

“I don’t see any reason to thinkF it wasn’t made in France,” said Laracuente, but he's uncertain. Why is Acker, Merrall, & Condit listed on the label then? 

“It’s a little odd. Most of the newspaper ads from that time advertising Sazerac de Forge available in Saigon or Australia or whatever, they’re not specifically labeled for [the store that's] providing them," he said.

Zev Glesta, assistant vice president and whiskey specialist with Sotheby’s auction house, had also never seen a bottle like Pertsovsky's Sazerac before. Though he agreed that all signs pointed to it being a bottle from the 1890s or early 1900s.

“You have to be a little loosey-goosey when trying to figure out what something like this is,” he told me.

Its unusual label reminded him a lot of an undateable bottle he auctioned in January. It lacked a brand name, only listing Charles Bellows on the label. Like Acker, Merrall, & Condit, Bellows had been a prominent wine and spirits merchant, operating out of lower Manhattan in the late-19th century. Unlike the Sazerac bottle, however, the Bellows bottle listed the liquid inside: pure unblended rye whiskey.

Glesta had expected it to sell for $10,000 to $15,000, but when the hammer hit, it went for a whopping $37,500. Could this mysterious Sazerac bottle potentially go for more?

When reporting for my book Dusty Booze: In Search of Vintage Spirits, vintage Cognac expert Salvatore Calabrese told me that pre-phylloxera Cognac—what this Sazerac seemed to be—is the absolute pinnacle of spirits, way more intensely aromatic and flavorful than modern Cognac vintages. So, whether this Sazerac was rye whiskey or Cognac, it would undoubtedly be worth a pretty penny.

“It’s too gluttonous for me to ever consider drinking,” said Pertrovsky. “Even though I’d love to taste it, I just feel like, to be honest with you, whatever is in there is not going to wow me.”

I’m not so sure I agree. I’ve had a few brandies and whiskeys from that era that were quite tasty. But, Pertrovsky doesn’t really want anyone to taste it. He doesn’t want to sell or auction it only to end up in the hand of a greedy private collector who'll hide it from the world. That’s why Pertrovsky ultimately has decided to donate it to Sazerac. He’s making plans to carefully ship it to Frankfort, KY.

Most likely, Sazerac too will never open the bottle, either. Thus, we'll never actually know what's inside.

“We try to keep them intact and don’t drink them at all," said Laracuente. "Just because you can’t replace it."

As I was about to file this story, a mystery unsolved, an idea struck me.

Maybe the 1795 on the label wasn’t a date, but a brand name—why else would that strange period after the year on the label exist?

I searched old newspapers for “Sazerac 1795.” The October 31, 1899 issue of the New Haven’s The Daily Morning Journal and Courier was suddenly up on my screen.

On page 5, in between a story about the opening of a new literary club and real estate listings, was an ad for "What a Doctor Prescribes”—booze. And there, amongst “Champagne for the stomach," “port wine for the blood,” and “claret for the liver,” was “brandy for faintness.” In other words, Cognac.

Bottles available included Hennessy 3 Star at a $1.70 and Old Pale at $2. But the most expensive brandy—at a whopping $3 a pop—was Sazerac "1795."

Was 1795 the year the Sazerac family first bottled well-aged Cognac? Was it a year of an exceptional grape harvest? Or had something significant happened in France that year that needed to be commemorated? 

Laracuente, for one, was surprised by my finding. He was also excited to ponder just how far ahead of its time Sazerac might've been. 

“I wonder how much was sold just by word of mouth and not advertised? Even naming it 1795 seems very 21st century," he said.

Sure, my findings had only raised more questions. But trying to answer the impossible is what makes tracking vintage spirits so fascinating. And, lucky for Pertovsky, Laracuente, and I, the hunt continues.

Related: This Bottle Was Bourbon’s Greatest Mystery—and Worth a Fortune. Then They Drank It