Vintage wines, spirits collected by Londoner who grew up in B.C.

A 1795 bottle of Cognac and an 1800 bottle of Madeira wine — those are the oldest spirits that B.C. vintage collector Edgar Harden has tracked down.

Harden, who was born in Coquitlam, collects and sells vintage liquors in their original bottles, starting from the 1980s to as far back as possible.

He runs The Old Spirits Company out of London, England, where he now lives, and sells these classic liquors to private customers and bars and restaurants around the world.

"They have an incredible sort of flavour, and they're from a time where things were made better," Harden told North by Northwest host Margaret Gallagher.

Liquor that is aged well, very well 

He explained that liquor that is hundreds of years in age can be drunk — as long as it was stored in the proper environment — because of the high alcohol proof it contains.

"A wine can often age 50 years if it's a really good one, and that's 12, 13 percent [alcohol]. If you had something that's triple to quadruple that in strength, the aging potential is huge," he said.

Harden says he mostly buys vintage spirits from private collections in Canada, Europe and the United States from collectors who tend to take care in preserving the liquor, storing it properly in a dark environment with the right temperature and humidity.

He says that it's not just private customers buying the spirits he collects — it's sometimes the brands themselves.

One such company is Gordon's, a brand of London dry gin, which keeps an archive of their older liquor in rural Scotland.

Harden said his career collecting and selling vintage spirits came about by accident.

While working in the European furniture department at a Christie's auction house in New York, he started to get invitations to pre-sale tastings for wines sold by the neighbouring wine department.

It was at these tastings, which gave bidders an opportunity to sample the wines before they were auctioned, that Harden learned how to properly appreciate and evaluate wine.

"I would go to those and taste these incredible things that mortals don't normally try, like Mouton 45 Victory Vintage or Domaine de la Romanée Conti 1961. [The latter is] a fabulous red burgundy, the kind of thing that Sean Connery would have ordered in the middle of a Bond film."

Harden began his vintage liquor career some years later, while working as a consultant in the field of high-end furniture and decorative arts.

Prohibition and Mad Men era liquor

He is interested in the historical significance of the vintage alcohol he collects — such as bottles from the prohibition era, and gin, vodka and Kina Lillet from the 1950s when James Bond writer Ian Fleming invented the Vesper cocktail.

"I often get pre-Castro, pre-revolution vintage Cuban rum. For rum aficionados, that's a real treat, that's like the high water mark for people. Everything before [the Cuban revolution] was made so well...and then after that it was companies like Bacardi producing huge quantities of stuff after they left and went to Bermuda and Puerto Rico."

He also acquired all of the bottles that were left after the final season of television period drama Mad Men wrapped up filming.

Harden said that sometimes he has to sacrifice what he could earn selling an irreplaceable bottle, just so he can sample it himself.

"I can't talk to someone about a Soviet-era vodka if I haven't actually drunken it myself," he said.

"I take it on the chin for the team sometimes."

To hear the full interview click on the audio labelled: Vintage spirits.