After the truck drove away with all my mini scotch bottles, I began to have second thoughts. Did I do the right thing? As I thought about it, the answer was yes. I would never get an offer like that again. 3,000 mini bottles for $25,000. I did the right thing.
As I reviewed my remaining collection, I had about 500 American whiskies, 300 vodkas, 300 rums and an odd assortment of couple of thousand bottles of other types of spirits. I decided to start to collecting vodkas and whiskies, including starting a new collection of scotch whisky minis. I only knew one other serious vodka collector and that was my friend George Lisenko. As it turned out, it was a good decision because in 1992, I took a job in the San Francisco Bay area with a company that was owned by an old friend of mine. He had a new product he was going to be manufacturing and he wanted me to come out and become his sales manager to take this new product to market. It was essentially a "poor man's cellular" product. By that I mean, it was a two way radio system that used a repeater that would allow people that were 100 miles away to talk to each other. When you connected a phone line to the repeater, you would have dial tone and could make telephone calls with a radio. It was different from cellular because you had to push the button when you wanted to talk and release the button to listen. Cellular phones, even though they are radios, can talk and listen at the same time because they are full duplex. Two way radios are half duplex and therefore you must push to talk and release to listen. There was no market for this product in the developed countries where cellular was established. However, in the third world countries and developing nations, there was not a good telephone infrastructure nor was cellular well established. As a result, I had great success in these countries selling my product. I would travel internationally almost every month to some place in the world. Russia became my biggest market. Between 1993 and 2002, I traveled to Russia almost thirty times. For the first 7 years of my visits to Russia, the Russians thought I was crazy. They could not believe someone was actually interested in 50ml bottles of vodka. They were interested in one or two liter bottles of vodka. Needless to say, I found many, many great Russian mini vodka bottles on my visits. I never knew or heard of any Russian mini bottle collectors until 2000. By 2010, there were 100's of mini bottle collectors in Russia. My vodka collection really grew during those 9 years of visiting places like Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland and other countries around the world. I discovered that only the state where Bombay, now Mumbai, is located sold miniature bottles in the entire country of India. I found mini vodkas in Hanoi, Viet Nam, in a flea market, in a sellers kiosk nestled way inside the flea market, away from the ever watchful eyes of the authorities. I found a liquor shop in Melbourne Australia that had the only large collection of mini bottles for sale in the entire country. I spent a lot of time on my trips looking for mini bottles and I had my distributors helping me by taking me to places they knew.
Perhaps the most interesting mini bottle story is the one I had in Namibia, in West Africa. This is one of the greatest countries I have ever visited. Very enlightened government. Just before dinner one evening, my distributor in Windhoek, took me to his personal liquor store to inquire about mini bottles. The proprietor was a Portuguese fellow and very friendly. He offered us a beer and as we were drinking our beers, a fellow walked into the shop and I was introduced to him. He was a black man, well dressed in a very nice business suit. As we talked about things in general and what I was doing in Windhoek, the question of what he did finally got asked. It turned out he was the Minister of Tourism and Business Development for Namibia. After about 20 minutes of our conversation, another very large, well dressed black man came into the shop. We were introduced and after a few minutes of small talk, and the question of what he did was asked, it turns out that he was the defense minister for Namibia. In less than an hour of visiting this liquor shop, I met two high officials in the government of Namibia. It was a really interesting visit. And I got some nice mini's to boot.
Next time, I will talk about an interesting Russian meeting in 1994.
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