As I mentioned earlier, my travels around the world that started in 1992 and continued until 2002 when the company was sold and my job was eliminated, took me to more than 100 countries around the world. In all my travels, I always made it a point to search for mini bottles. After a few of faithful pursuit of mini bottles, my distributors finally began to get the idea that I was serious and they began looking for places where I could find mini's when I visited their country. Too many of the countries I visited did not sell or manufacture mini bottles. Many of those countries did sell mini's but they were always the popular brands like Johnnie Walker or Jim Beam or Jack Daniels. Some of the countries that were really gold mines for mini bottles were some of the European countries like Japan, Germany, England, Scotland, Estonia, Ukraine and Hungary. I am sure I am leaving out many countries, but these are the ones I remember well. I remember going to Old Town in Budapest and entering through the Wenceslaus Gate. There was a liquor store a short way into Old Town. This was a real gold mine for me. It was probably one of the great international shops I ever visited. There were so many mini bottles in that shop, especially vodka. I remember he was selling a mini vodka called T-34 and it had the Russian T-34 tank on the label. He only had 6 of them and I bought all of them. I have a good eye for mini bottles that will be hard to find in the future and I always try to buy 6 or 10 of those to bring back with me for other collectors. I did that all over the world. On several trips I brought back 150 - 200 mini bottles and never had a problem coming back through US Customs. New York was always the easiest place for me to come back into the United States. Atlanta could be tough sometimes.
I remember on one trip to Kiev in the Ukraine, I went to a regular place I always went to for buying mini's. There weren't many places to buy mini's in Kiev so I always went to the same 3 or 4 places. When I got to this place, I saw a bottle that looked interesting that I did not have. When I bought the bottle, the alert sales clerk said she had more. She then presented me with a pack of 5 mini vodkas. Then I noticed that there were more packs on the shelf behind her. When I asked her if I could see one of the packs behind her, I noticed that there were a couple of different labels in that pack. I started to get excited and I asked her to see all the packs she had, These were the Kazenkas. I bought 57 bottles that day with about 30 different years. For those of you who are not familiar with the Kazenkas, they are set of mini vodkas with a different lable for each year of the communist rule of the Soviet Union. They also made some bottes with different labels and also made a few years with two different lables. I was so excited that I sent an email message to my friend George Lisenko and told him about this great find. I told him I was bringing a lot of duplicates back with me for him. That trip I brought back 200 mini bottles and I was scared to death that US Customs would surely stop me and confiscate the bottles on my return. The good news is that there was no problem and that gave me encouragement to do it again in the future, which I certainly did. On my next visit to Kiev, I had one of my distributors locate the place where they made the Kazenka and take me to visit it. That turned out to be an even bigger gold mine as I was able to find almost all of the labels I was missing. I bought 120 bottles that day and brought back 180 mini bottles in total from that trip.
Kiev is also the place where I found the three Hetman mini vodkas. The yellow, blue and white lables. These are beautiful frosted glass window bottles. There is a fourth Hetman with a red stripe that is made in Poland. The Ukrainian Hetmans were discontinued in 1999.
France remains to this day, as an engima to me when it comes to collecting mini bottles. They produce some of the most beautiful mini bottles in the world, but I have yet to ever find any of them in shops in France. I cannot figure out where they sell them. Fortunately for me, I have friends around the world that can find them and sell, trade or give them to me for which I am most thankful.
One of the most interesting bottles I ever found in my travels, is one I found in Nigeria. Of all things, it was a tequila made in Nigeria called Woorm vodka(spelling is correct) and, of course, it had a worm in it. They had three of them on the shelf and I bought all three of them.
Japan has always been a great place to buy mini's . Just go the B-1 level in one of the many department stores to find mini's. At least that is where they used to always be. Since Japan has so many whiskey distillers, there were always many mini Japanese whiskies available for sale. Many of them were done in really beautiful and distinct bottles and are great collector items.
I hope you enjoyed this brief trip around the mini bottle world. Next time I will talk about buying and selling collections. Many people through the years have asked my advise on that subject and I will give you my thoughts on it.
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