Shipwrecked Whisky Resurfaces At Auction

When the SS Politician sank in 1941 near the island of Eriskay in the Outer Hebrides off the coast of Scotland, it went down with several bottles of whisky – 28,000 cases to be exact – never making it to its ultimate destination of Jamaica. Some of those bottles were lost forever but many others washed ashore and were subsequently collected by locals who either drank them or hid them from customs officers. Last week, one of those label-less bottles – whose contents are not fit for human consumption – went up for auction even though it had lost some of its precious brown liquid before being sealed with wax by the auction house. The bottle was discovered by a local resident in 1997 while digging a path for a garden.

The bottle – believed to be the Black and White brand, despite the lack of a label – was sold for $2,143.