BBC Antiques Roadshow guest gobsmacked by…

BBC Antiques Roadshow guest gobsmacked by 'unbelievable' value of whisky left in loft for 50 years

An Antiques Roadshow guest was lost for words after discovering the "unbelievable" value of three whisky bottles she'd had in her loft for 50 years.

During the latest edition of the BBC One show on Sunday evening (October 9), a woman brought three bottles Johnnie Walker whiskies for expert John Foster to value.

Talking about how she came to own the alcohol, she 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 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?' They've been put away ever since."

But it turns out her grandmother's dismay at her husband bringing the bottles home and then hiding them in the loft wasn't the best idea. "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 whines and other people's whisky," he said.

"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. What you've got here is three varying bottles, but what's interesting is the date of them."

Going on to explain exactly what the guest had in her possession, John went on: "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."

As he went on to discuss the value, he said: "You know, really, you're sort of looking at around £1,000 for that one," he began, before adding of the other two more expensive bottles, "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."

In response to discovering the three bottles would be worth around £15,000, the guest remarked: "Oh wow, that's unbelievable isn't it?"

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