Coming Home: A Bourbon Collector’s Return After Four Months Abroad. Spain, Italy, China. December 2014
After spending four incredible months traveling across Spain, Italy, and China, I finally made it back home to Chicago just a few days before Christmas in December 2014. It felt surreal — not just being home after so long, but seeing everything I had quietly accumulated along the way.
During my travels, I unexpectadely stumbled upon bottle after bottle of rare, hard to find bourbon. Check out my previous stories of my bourbon adventures in Spain, Barcelona, and China for the full recap!
Out of necessity and the inability to lug around heavy bottles of bourbon my entire trip, I had to ship countless boxes back to my parents house in Chicago. Whenever I stumbled across a rare bottle, whether tucked away in a dusty shop in Barcelona or a shady website in China, I had to pack it up and send it home. Little by little, shipment after shipment, the collection grew without me even being there to see it in person.
Vintage Bourbon 17 year, Old Grand Dad, Vintage Blantons, William Larue Weller
This trip started to develop a pattern. Find a bunch of rare bottles and then scramble to figure out how I was going to ship them home. I was a nomad for those 4 months, and I could not have heavy bourbon bottles weighing me down. If I was lucky I would find a sturdy cardboard box on the street and a shop with packing materials and tape. Once this was secured it was always a mad dash to wrap up the bottles and get them to a shipping center, often requiring borrowed carts, dolleys, and expensive cab rides to the nearest post office. After a short while I learned to always have packing tape with me and that newspapers and travel magazines made the perfect, and free, packing material (Now I always have a roll of tape and some bubble wrap with me when I travel).
Walking through the door of my parents’ house and finally seeing all the boxes stacked up felt like Christmas morning — both literally and figuratively. Bottles I had almost forgotten about were waiting for me: reminders of the places I had been, the people I had met, and the tiny moments of excitement I felt uncovering each find.
Vintage Bourbon 17 year
More than anything, though, it was good to simply be back with my family. After months spent halfway across the world, there’s something comforting about being home for the holidays — good food, familiar faces, and, of course, a few celebratory pours of bourbon to mark the occasion.
That moment — standing there, surrounded by family and a growing collection of bottles — felt like the perfect close to an incredible year of travel, adventure, and bourbon hunting. But I also knew it was just the beginning of a whole new chapter to come.
-Adam