Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the Patron is selling for $6,800 after the Montgomery County Department of Liquor Control reevaluated and reduced the price.
WASHINGTON — The Montgomery County Department of Liquor Control controls liquor sales in the Maryland county, and that includes the really good stuff.
It apparently does a good job of snooping out rare offerings, and there is a fair amount of demand for it.
An example? The county now has, under lock-and-key, a bottle of Patron tequila that’s priced at $6,799.
But it’s not just any Patron tequila.
It comes in a Lalique crystal decanter, and the special series, “Patron en Lalique: Serie 1,” is an extremely limited run of rare tequila in what must be very fine, French crystal.
“It is so rare. There are only 500 bottles for the whole world. So when we found out it was so rare, we said, ‘Yes, we will take one,'” Diane Wurdeman, at the county’s Department of Liquor Control, told WTOP.
Described as a blend of the oldest and rarest of tequilas hand-selected from Patron’s barrel aging room, it is aged for four years and bottled in a Lalique crystal decanter “inspired by Mexico’s Weber blue agave plant with a bottle stop shaped to represent the heart of the agave, the Pina,” says the brochure.
The individually-numbered decanter comes in a handmade leather case with a leather-bound book and video that documents the Patron collaboration with Lalique.
Selling so-called “allocated spirits” is actually a pretty popular business for Montgomery County’s Department of Liquor Control.
There is so much demand for some of the rare finds it gets its hands on (usually bourbons), that it now runs lotteries for interested buyers.
The department says it is difficult to procure the amount to meet buyer demand, but it is always gathering information about collectible and allocated items and tries to get it hands on as much as it can.
A recent example was a bottle of Old Rip Van Winkle 25-year-old bourbon that it procured.
“There were only 710 bottles made in the whole world. We were lucky enough to get the only bottle in the whole state of Maryland,” Wurdeman said. “It was $1,888. We put it out as a lottery and we got over 3,000 entrants.”
Interested in the $6,800 tequila, or other allocated spirits? See what there is and subscribe for email alerts on the Montgomery County Department of Liquor Control website.
