This is the story of how I made my friend Katharine's New Year's Eve party epic. It was going to be fun, but I like to think I made it even better. Well, I didn't make it but so much better. In fact, it was my grandfather that made it better. Here is how it happened.
It all started with the first New Year's invite. I was invited to join a group at Richmond's Tobacco Company. I hate Tobacco Company, but it was all I had so far. So I considered it. I was also offered an opportunity to meet an attractive Arabic girl. So there was option one.
Option two was the default option. Go to Richmond with Craig and Elliott and see what happens. This option is always a safe bet to see something ridiculously awesome. If there is not anything ridiculously awesome, Craig will probably be wasted and something good has to come from that. So there was option two.
Option three was Katharine's party in Norfolk. This is also a pretty safe bet for fun. Usually it will not result in something mindboggling like Craig and Elliott nights, but they will always be fun. Her house is also a couple blocks from the beach. I don't care if it's December/January. I love the beach at night in winter. It's so cold and empty, desolate if you will, yet I find it beautiful because despite the irony of the time period, the sounds and smell are the same. So there is option three.
The decision was made the moment my grandfather made an awesome proposition to me.
Two days after Christmas, I went with my family to my grandfather's house in South Carolina along the Georgia Border. His cleaning ladies knocked a wheel off one of his trains, so my parents spent a good thirty minutes looking for super glue. They opened one cabinet door and, while they found no glue, they found my grandfather's liquor cabinet. My grandfather has not partaken of his liquor cabinet in at least ten years. The liquor drinker in our family was my late grandmother, and she died in May 2001 (On the day I returned from a three day field trip to New York City; talk about a downer).
So my grandfather had liquor that had not been touched in nearly a decade. Most of the bottles did not appear to be less than 20 years old. The exception to this rule was the Canadian Crown whiskey, my grandmother's favorite, and the various bottles of Irish cream. After discussing it over lunch at the Aiken Brewing Company, my grandfather consented to letting the only living person in the family that drank liquor take it. Thankfully, that person was me.
That's right. He gave me a shit-ton of liquor that was older than I was.
When we returned to his house, my father and I emptied the cabinet and decided what to do with each bottle. Some of it was easy to make a decision. Two bottles of open creme de menthe? You are going down the drain because nobody likes you. Antique Bailey's Irish Cream? You are the most entertaining bottle of all, and for that same reason you are the easiest bottle to decide on. The first bottle was coagulated, but with a good rinsing, the poured out. The other bottle of it, not so much. My father took the cap off and asked me would Irish cream come with a cork AND a cap? I had no answer for him, but I handed him a corkscrew. The corkscrew slid right in. That was not a cork. That was what happened to Irish cream after it sits in a cupboard for a quarter of a century.
I promised all of the brandy to Elliott. I promised the Chivas Regal to me. I also the bottle of French wine from 1986 for myself. An unopened bottle of wine from the year I was born? That's one of the coolest things one can find. Imagine how much I'd have to pay for the same bottle at a store now? I don't even know if it's a wine that keeps 25 years, but I know I'll never see a bottle like that again.
The real prize, and what made New Year's Eve fantastic, was the ancient bottle of Ron Rico White Label rum. My grandparents lived in Rye, New York until 1971, when they moved to Ridgewood, New Jersey. The Ron Rico had a price tag on it from Port Chester, New York. My grandparents have never had a reason to buy rum from Port Chester since before they moved, making it at least 39 years old, and more likely over 40. My father was, at the latest, a junior in college. Richard Nixon was president. We had troops in Vietnam. That is an old bottle of rum for somebody to just give you.
Imagine how amazing that rum was going to taste New Year's Eve. I chose option three, Katharine's party, because of that rum. I could not take the liquor into the Tobacco Company, so option one was out. Elliott and Craig would not stay put, and I was not going to move that liquor all across Richmond (though if I did, that would be an awesome night too), so that was out. That left me with Katharine's party. So as soon as I returned from South Carolina, I made my way down to Norfolk.
Katharine took the first shot of the 4o-year-old rum. Her drinking it truly fascinated me. The bottle was open, but only a shot was taken. Then she tasted it. Over the course of forty years, only two people had partaken of that rum. One person, possibly now dead, took only about a shot of it forty years ago. On the last day of 2010, Katharine had a shot. Forty years. A dead person and Katharine. That's intense.
The last point I will make about the awesome liquor haul, because this entry is getting ridiculous, is that Nicole made Long Island iced teas using only my old liquor. All the liquor put into those drinks was over 25-years-old. Each bottle, had it been a car, would have been an antique car. Think about that. Nicole was making us Long Island antiques. And they were delicious.
My grandfather gave me liquor that, at this point, was worth well over a thousand dollars.
We had a thousand dollars of liquor. And we drank it
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