The contents of your loft could hold the key to an unexpected windfall. Of course, if your roof space just holds a few empty boxes from moving house then you'll be out of luck but for one BBC Antiques Roadshow guest, they discovered a gem after digging out items that had been squirreled away for 50 years.
Presenting the professionals on the show with three whisky bottles, it was up to expert John Foster to value the boozy bundle. The guest said: "They've been in my possession for 50 years, but they came into our house in the 1950s. My grandfather bought them home one day to the horror of my grandmother and said, "look what I got."
The guest explained further: "The landlord was closing his pub down and said, "would you like these bottles?" And he said, "yes." And she said, "what am I going to do with those?" It was then revealed that the collection was soon banished to an unseen space, adding: "They've been put away ever since."
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On the show, John examined the bottles. He said: "So when you say they've been put away in the attic, that's not great because obviously, you have got some evaporation that's going on here. So that is going to affect it a bit.
"The history of Johnnie Walker whiskies is, he starts his own sort of business around the 1820s, 1830s, owning a grocery store in Kilmarnock in Scotland, selling wines and other people's whisky. "About 30, 40 years later, he realised he was missing a trick. He could blend his own whisky and it became almost an instant success."
According to a report in Liverpool Echo, John added: "What you've got here is three varying bottles, but what's interesting is the date of them. You've got the red label there, which I think this one would date from the sort of 1930s, maybe '40s. But then the rarer white label is much more sort of 1907, 1908, that sort of period."
John then explained how whisky has become more popular throughout the 2000s. Giving his first valuation for the red label bottle, he said: "You know, really, you're sort of looking at around £1,000 for that one."
Pointing to the white label bottles, John said: "These two, the levels are low, the labelling is better on one that it is on the other. You can see they've got a bit of damage, but they've still got the nice white label.
"These ones would be about £7,000 per bottle." Gobsmacked, the guest said: "Oh wow, that's unbelievable isn't it?"
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