The Story Of The Most WTF Bottle In My Collection
Put on your gloves before you touch the damn thing! (Photo by Margaret Pattillo)
I wouldn’t say I’m a collector of booze… I don’t think. But given my line of work, I definitely accumulate a lot of interesting, noteworthy, and rare bottles, some of which I hold onto with more tenacity than others. So even if I’m not a collector, I’ve amassed a pretty cool collection over the years, enough to keep me and my spouse properly pickled for the rest of our lives. But if someone was to ask me what the most unlikely bottle in my collection is, there’s one I’d point to right away. Although before actually taking it down from the shelf, I’d have to put on white gloves to handle it. Because that’s the kind of bottle it is.
Our story begins in the summer of 2017, when I got a text from a booze publicist friend asking if I would like a bottle of Mandarine Napoleon orange liqueur. Hey, you can never have too much orange liqueur, especially when you regularly make margaritas and mai tais as I do. But this was no ordinary bottle of orange liqueur. It was one of only 125 in the world, with a base spirit containing 125 year old cognac, and it retailed — if you could find it — for $2,000 and change. And I’m not sure if he mentioned it to me at the time, but the bottle was coated by hand with 24-karat gold. All I had to do was write about it for Robb Report, a publication which was seemingly created for writeups of this sort of outlandishly upscale thing.
One greenlighted pitch later, the bottle was winging its way to me from New Orleans, where it had been displayed — and partially emptied — at Tales Of The Cocktail. You see, Mandarine Napoleon is based in Belgium, and they must have thought, we don’t want to bring an already-opened bottle back with us, even if it happens to be covered in gold. And that’s why the global brand manager for Mandarine Napoleon spent part of her first-ever trip to New York lugging it, and the large wooden box in which it was encased, on the subway to the Upper West Side, where we met at the now-closed Manhattan Cricket Club for cocktails and a formal bottle handoff. Oh, and a tasting as well — fortunately, it not only didn’t suck, it is in fact a sublime liqueur, thanks in large part to the 1892-vintage cognac which gives it a deeper, richer flavor than standard Napoleon (which is pretty damn good itself). Before touching the bottle, I was given a pair of white gloves, so my grubby mitts wouldn’t sully the gold.
Not long after acquiring the liqueur, I found out about a super-limited edition tequila from Jose Cuervo which contained minute amounts of 100-year-old tequila, which had been resting in glass demijohns since it was distilled. I thought, wow, a margarita with century-old tequila AND orange liqueur including 125-year-old cognac would be pretty amazing. How much would someone pay to drink something like that? And more importantly, could I get paid to create the cocktail and write an article about it? Robb Report said YES, on one condition: the drink had to actually be for sale in a bar. PR departments were gotten on board. Samples of both tequila and liqueur were to be donated. A venue — the Palm Court at the Plaza Hotel — was selected. All systems were go.
And then… nothing happened. Checking my old emails, it seems like we all collectively forgot about it. But what I think happened is that The Palm Court was leery of accepting free booze for legal reasons, and they didn’t want to shell out the bucks to acquire the tequila and the liqueur just because some yayhoo from Robb Report wanted to write about it. So it never happened.
I still have a little bit left of the liqueur — I last used it on my wife’s birthday, when I made her a margarita using it along with El Tesoro’s rare and spectacular 80th Anniversary tequila. It’s not 100-year-old Cuervo, but it was pretty amazing regardless. And of course we had a sip of the liqueur on its own, because you can’t just use something like that for mixing. Oh, and of course I put the white gloves on before I touched the bottle. What do you take me for, some kind of hooligan?
Anyway, here’s my review of the liqueur, and the bottle, straight outta Robb Report.