Origin
Ireland
The shelf we are building: Irish single pot still whiskey and Waterford cut crystal
No lots held
Serving pieces from Ireland
Nothing from Ireland on the shelf yet. We would rather say so than pad the page out with things we do not have.
Not seeing it?
We buy from dealers and at auction worldwide, and most of what we handle never appears on a shelf at all. Tell us what you are after and we will go and look for it, say honestly whether it is worth the money, and agree our part before anything is bid.
Tell us what you are afterHow Ireland came to make it
- 1405The Annals of Clonmacnoise record a chieftain dead of too much aqua vitae: whiskey's first written appearance anywhere
- 1608A licence to distil is granted in County Antrim, the date on the Bushmills label
- 1783George and William Penrose found the glasshouse at Waterford
The first written mention of whiskey anywhere is Irish, and it is an obituary. The Annals of Clonmacnoise record that at Christmas 1405 Richard Magrannell, chieftain of Moyntyreolas, died of a surfeit of aqua vitae - which the annalist notes was to him not aqua vitae but aqua mortis. The Irish called it uisce beatha, water of life, and the English heard that as whiskey. A licence to distil was granted in County Antrim in 1608, the date Bushmills still carries, and John Jameson set up in Bow Street, Dublin, in 1780.
By the nineteenth century Irish whiskey was the most drunk spirit in the world and Dublin was its capital. Then it went, almost completely. The Dublin houses rejected the continuous still as a cheapening of the craft and watched Scotch blends take their market with it. The trade war that followed independence shut the Empire out, American Prohibition shut the rest, and by the 1970s there were two working distilleries left on the whole island. Everything you can buy from Ireland today comes out of a revival that is barely a generation old, which is why so much of it is young and why the old bottles are so scarce.