Executive Decision

Some of you may be wondering why you haven’t heard much from the blog lately. Or not. With the lockdown, there simply isn’t much going on…except that sales from the Etsy store are raging!!! And since THAT is the activity that consumes (and amuses) me these days, I made the decision to start incorporating what I’m doing in conjunction with the Etsy shop here on the blog. In lockdown, it’s what I do to keep busy. I love it, don’t get me wrong, but there just isn’t much else to write about.

It may or may not interest you, but I found the whole series of events from yesterday morning fairly amusing. I hope you do too.

So, with the lockdown, we cannot travel outside the house except for essentials, but all non-essential businesses are closed. Waahhh! No brocantes, no antique stores, no flea markets…but there ARE still online auctions. Being a long-time auction lover, I peruse the French auctions regularly.

With Christmas sales from the Etsy shop through the roof this year, I’m starving for inventory and have found myself having quite some ‘sessions’ with auctions, sometimes watching three or four at a time! You should see all my notes with lot numbers I’m interested in lined up in the order that they display on my browser. And it’s not unheard of for me to have the iMac, the MacBook Pro, and the iPad carefully orchestrated across my desk to keep an eye on all that’s happening. Some might consider this madness, I call it ‘heaven!’

Mostly I’ve concentrated on affordable vintage oil paintings, but I did happen upon a mixed auction and ended up with FIVE banana boxes full of stuff. As the days roll by, I am researching the items that I ended up with, and this is the story of ONE of the 26 items I bought at this single auction…

This is the chronicle of a mysterious green bottle. Here it is in all its glory. Tough to photograph, but interesting in its shape. It stands nearly 14” tall and the liquid goes into the donut shape of the bottle. The glass is fused in the middle of the ‘donut’, with a centre medallion design of a crown over a shield motif. The most remarkable part of the item though, was the distinctive musketeer hat shape of the glass stopper.

And so I started out by taking a photo and doing an image search on Google. Came up with a couple of similar ones, but they were much smaller and the vendors were all calling them perfume bottles. So I figured MAYBE mine was a factice, an oversized dummy store display to market big-name perfumes. But at this point, if it was a perfume bottle at 6” tall, it seemed a HUGE quantity of perfume to me, but what do I know? So I started down that rat hole.

I went on antique perfume bottle sites, searched on Pinterest, Etsy, Ebay and various other antique sites, both in English and French, and only came up with the small bottles for sale, with no mention of brand, origin, or age, so of course I was becoming more and more skeptical. I even went as far as posting photos with an inquiry on an online antique bottle and glass forum. No takers there, so got up yesterday morning determined to get to the bottom of it.

At this point, I had probably perused hundreds of pages of images and sites looking for clues. You know how tenacious I can be! Well this morning I figured maybe ‘simpler’ is ‘better’ and entered in my search engine, “green glass Musketeer hat stopper” and, lo and behold, there it was…an Armagnac bottle! 6” tall with the musketeer hat stopper.

Soooo, off I went to figure out WHAT Armagnac it was. After a few dozen more sites, I discovered it was Marquis De Montesquiou Armagnac. Now that I had a brand name, I could really get down to business.

Well, I discovered that the Montesquious are one of the oldest families in France, dating back to the 5th century, and had been making Armagnac since 1431. The present incarnation of Marquis de Montesquiou Armagnac was started 70 years ago by Pierre de Montesquiou, who was a direct descendant of the most famous de Montesquiou of all—the Comte d’Artagnan, on whom the hero of The Three Musketeers was based!

With the Armagnac area just to the south of us and the Cognac region just north of here, I started getting really excited about the whole Armagnac vs Cognac conundrum. This is over Sunday breakfast, mind you.

So, being very satisfied with my detective skills, I asked my lovely Theo exactly what the difference was between an Armagnac and Cognac (besides the regions obviously). And he headed to the booze cupboard and suggested we taste the difference. And I simultaneously started the online research to learn more about the production than I ever imagined I wanted to know.

Now, it is only 11 in the morning and here we are, tasting brandies. Too much fun! We didn’t come to many conclusions, other than that we must visit these regions and do further taste tests…and liquor in the morning is a whole lotta fun!

It’s interesting to note that the modern bottle shape of Marquis De Montesquieu is inspired by the flasks used by the Musketeers. So cool!

And so, I’ve come to the conclusion that my purchase is an example of a rare bottle format the company reserved for special end-of-year celebration bottles or gift decanters, perhaps with the possibility of personalising the label. I have not seen another in this size that still has its stopper intact, so that makes me smile!

I’m still trying to date it though, but in any case, it is a lovely collector item that I’m hoping someone will purchase and treasure!