Stephen Remsberg's Rum at Auction
Longtime rum collectors and tiki drink aficionados know the story of Stephen Remsberg’s rum collection. To briefly recap. Remsberg, a New Orleans attorney, was an avid collector of vintage and modern-day rums. At somewhat over 1,200 bottles (per my emails with him,) it wasn’t the largest rum collection in the world, but it contained many treasures, some dating back to the late 1800s. When Remsberg passed away in late 2022, many people speculated about what would happen to all the bottles.
I previously wrote about the collection in my story, Stephen Remsberg’s Rum Collection - Where is it Now? The short answer is that Italian collector Luca Gargano purchased the collection and moved it to his home base in Genoa, Italy.
But after writing that story, I learned of an interesting twist—Gargano hadn’t purchased the entire collection, and some of the bottles remained in New Orleans. As such, I wasn’t completely surprised when I saw that (most of?) the remaining bottles would be auctioned on September 19th, 2024, by Neal Auction, a New Orleans auctioneer. The auction listing can be viewed here: Catalog - Premier Estate Collections: Session 1 - Sept 19th: Lots 1-208.
Although I’m not a vintage rum collector, photos of old bottles provide extremely important context for students of rum history like me. Naturally, I looked through all the lots on the auction site and recognized a few bottles I had seen when I visited Remsberg’s house in 2018. (My aforementioned “Where Is It Now” story has many photos from that visit, so it is worth checking out.)
From looking at the lots, I think that Gargano took the lion’s share of the truly historical bottles. However, a few bottles of interest remain for collectors without an extensive collection of truly pricey bottles. Mixed into what Gargano didn’t take are fairly recent bottles, which we can reasonably assume were gifts.
The auction notes from certain lots note, “Special thanks to Jeff “Beachbum” Berry for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.” Jamaican rum is well represented in the lots, including:
Alfred Lamb’s Special Consignment Jamaican (1939)
Thompson’s Special Jamaica Pot Still (25-year)
Bellows Jamaica 19-year
WA Gilbey Governor General Jamaica
Edwin Charley “Virtue”
J. Wray & Nephew Special Reserve 12 year
Relatively recent Appleton Estate bottlings are very well represented, including:
Appleton Estate 30-Year
Appleton 250th Anniversary
Appleton Estate “Joy”
The “Joy” is signed by Appleton Estate’s Joy Spence, who visited Remsberg around the same time as my visit.
Another recent but rare bottling—in fact, the only one in existence— is a 3-liter bottle of The Collector, a special blend of Long Pond rums created by Alexandre Gabriel and presented to Remsberg at a 2018 event in his honor. I attended the event and took the photos shown below. In the auction images, you can see that Gabriel signed the bottle. A separate auction lot has the smaller 200 ml bottling given to event attendees, including Ian Burrell, Jeff Berry, and several other Plantation “O.F.T.D. Brothers.”
Other notable lots include:
Quite a few vintage Mount Gay bottlings
Lawrence’s Medford 1881
Alleyne Arthur Reserve rum distilled in 1985 and subsequently bottled by Foursquare.
Rhum Clément distilled in 1936. The lot notes state, “Special bottling for Stephen Remsberg by Ben Jones owner of Rhum Clément.”
La Louisiane “Barbados Type Liqueur Rum”
Rhum J. Bally 1947
It will be interesting to see what prices these bottles fetch at auction. I can see a few going for a bit over $1,000, but many will likely go for far less. Not because they’re not of historical interest but rather because their particular provenance isn’t currently in favor with most vintage hunters. I, for one, will be watching the auction closely while in progress.
