If You’re Not Celebrating Old Fashioned Week With This $15,000 Cocktail… Are You Even Living?

If like this author, your tastes skew even a little cliché, you may have ordered the occasional Old Fashioned or two in your lifetime. Japes aside, this archetype of imbibed masculinity – a favourite of everybody from Don Draper to that work friend of yours who thinks he’s Don Draper – is once again getting a nine-day festival, nominally under the auspices of Kentucky distiller, Woodford Reserve.

To celebrate the imminent launch of Old Fashioned Week 2022, mixologists in Sydney and Melbourne have just created Australia’s priciest cocktail – available at a grand total of two venues (one per city) for $15,000 a glass.

I suppose that’s one way to spice up your bar tab should the prospect of drinking ’61 Petrus or Japanese whisky from a closed distillery leave you bored to tears.

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Available at Dean & Nancy and Sky Bar, the Gold Fashioned is egregious enough to give Maurizio Cattelan’s America a run for its money. Constructed in the image of a classic Old Fashioned, this limited-time recipe is built upon Baccarat Edition Woodford Reserve ($3,000); flavoured with handmade vanilla and saffron bitters; and then finished with a reduction of Chateau D’Yquem 2011 ($899) – because why settle for sugar cubes when only the sweet sweet taste of botrytis will do?

First held by Parisian bartenders in 2015, Old Fashion Week is an annual celebration of the eponymous classic cocktail, which has been administered directly by Woodford Reserve since 2018.

In Australia, the 2022 edition will run between November 5 – November 14 with over 200 participating bars and restaurants nationwide. For a full list, head to Woodford Reserve’s thematic website below.