A single bottle of bourbon just sold for $80,600. Twenty-two years ago, it cost $113.
That staggering return — roughly 71,000% — belongs to the “Binny’s 18,” a Van Winkle bourbon that headlined what may be the most consequential American whiskey auction ever assembled, hosted by Chicago-based Unicorn Auctions. For serious collectors, the result wasn’t just a transaction. It was a coronation.
The bottle’s legend begins in a Kentucky warehouse in June 1985, when barrels of unfiltered, barrel-proof Stitzel-Weller bourbon were laid down — long before Pappy Van Winkle became a cultural obsession. Nearly two decades later, in 2003, Chicago retailer Binny’s Beverage Depot hand-selected those barrels for a private bottling, priced them at a thoroughly ordinary $113, and unknowingly created one of the five most sought-after bourbon bottles ever produced.
Chicago’s fingerprints were all over the auction. Another standout lot, the Twisted Spoke 16 Year Bourbon — a Van Winkle private barrel selected for a beloved Chicago biker bar that closed last year after a 30-year run — fetched over $18,400. Together, the two bottles tell a specific and remarkable story: in the early 2000s, a handful of Chicago bars and retailers quietly commissioned some of the most valuable private-barrel Van Winkle bottlings in history, almost none of them realizing it at the time.
Rounding out the historically significant lots was one of only three known bottles of a Pappy Van Winkle 23 Year, which sold for over $12,000. It holds the distinction of being the only Van Winkle private bottling ever produced at exactly 16 years old and 105 proof — and one of the rare fully custom, private-label bourbons ever bottled by Willett.
What Unicorn assembled wasn’t just a collection of expensive whiskey. It was a time capsule of an era when some of America’s greatest bourbon was quietly changing hands in Chicago — and almost nobody noticed.
