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Seen on Ebay’ article, besides which, I don’t have much to show you. Peter Bonkovich has sent a
few sales over the last few months, so I will show you them here.

The Duck is from Luxardo of Italy. It sold for £10.50 (about NZ$21) which is a little cheap. Maybe
because it was said to be empty – looks sealed and therefore full to me. The Moana Monkeys was
the first Lionstone Safari Set bottle that I bought for my own collection. But not for US$61 which this
one sold for. This set does not normally fetch anything like that so I assume that we had two
collectors bidding against each other to complete their set. The frog is another Luxardo bottle. US$30
bought it – about right I think.

Harwoods Canadian whisky was also said to be empty but
certainly does not look so. It was made in 1949 and sold in
2013 for US$5.60 – a very poor price. The next two bottles
are not bottles. The Whyte and McKay Scotch is a wooden
bottle that unscrews to reveal 3 dice. £8.49 bought it – also
very cheap. The John Dewar & Sons metal bottle
unscrews and turns into a corkscrew. They date from
1890-1910 and are very collectable. £42 was about right
for this one, some rarer ones fetch a lot more.

I have been working on adding US bottles to Miniature
Bottle Library over the last few months, one letter at a time.
I am now working on ‘T’ so not too long to go now. One
major problem I have faced is the ‘shuffling’ of brands
between the major and even some minor North American
liquor companies. A number of companies who were big names only a few years ago have been
broken up, with their brands going to other industry players. Seagram’s and Allied Domeq are the
best known of these. Buying one brand often results in having to dispose of other competing brands.
A huge number of minor brands changed hands as late as February last year. And many articles on
the Internet are not dated, so you often find contradictory information. On the next page is a ‘Family
Tree’ of Bourbons which I believe is up-to-date and which I think will interest you. The close
relationship of competing brands will, I am sure, also be a surpise to some of you.

Richard Scott, a producer at Radio New Zealand, phoned Colin Ryder for
a interview about miniature bottle collecting. Apparently he found the club
web site. Colin ‘passed th buck’ to me. There is a radio programme,
called ‘This Way Up,’ on between 12 noon and 2pm on Saturdays. The
presenter, Simon Morton, came to my place and interviewed me for over
an hour. The format of the show (which I try to listen to each week but don’t always suceed) is an
interview of about 20/30 minutes, so we should get some good publicity out of it. I will email NZ
members when I know the date but the interview will probably go out in February. I will also email a
link to a podcast to all members after the broadcast.

David Smith

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