Tannenblut · Black Forest Gin
Tannenblut · Bereshit Series

Family-office allocation, by private correspondence.

Three thousand individually numbered bottles, distilled once, never reproduced. The Bereshit Series is not sold through retail. There is no public shop. Allocation proceeds through the collector list, on the same logic that allocates a Patek complication, a Pappy Van Winkle release, or a Rolls-Royce commission: relationship before transaction, biography before invoice.

Closing plate, wax seal, engraved number
The record that travels with the bottle to the collector.

The shelf that was never there

At the upper edge of the collector market, the ordinary architecture of retail disappears. There is no display case, no price tag, no button that completes the sale. A bottle of Pappy Van Winkle twenty-three year is not found by entering a shop; it is found by being remembered. Patek Philippe does not publish an order form for the rarest complications. Rolls-Royce builds a Phantom for a commissioner whose brief has been read, re-read, and interpreted by a design team that regards the car as a continuation of the owner’s biography.

Where supply is truly finite and demand is effectively infinite, an auction of money alone produces the wrong buyers. It produces speculators, flippers, and strangers. It does not produce custodians. The houses that have lasted for a century or more understand this, and they have replaced the shelf with the allocation.

Waiting lists as a form of due diligence

A waiting list at a serious house is not a queue in the commercial sense. It is a reading period. During the years in which a collector waits, the house learns the collector: what has been bought before, what has been kept, what has been shown, what has been lent to museums, what has been resold within eighteen months at auction. The list is a slow biography assembled by the seller, and the eventual allocation is the judgement at the end of that biography.

This reverses the usual direction of due diligence. In ordinary commerce the buyer vets the product. Here the seller vets the buyer. The question is not whether the client can pay. That is assumed long before the conversation begins. The question is whether the object will be honoured.

How Tannenblut allocates

The Bereshit Series follows the same discipline. Three thousand bottles, distilled once in the Black Forest, never reproduced. No public retail. No open shop. Allocation by private invitation only. Six tiers organise the edition:

  • The Rebbe Bottle No. 770 — one-of-one at the apex, € 77,000.
  • The Holy Numbers Edition — numerals with Hebrew documentation, € 7,700.
  • Founder’s Tier (No. 1–50) — hand-signed, under founder oversight, € 980.
  • Early Collector Edition (No. 51–200) — signed rabbinical certificate of origin, € 495.
  • Double-Chai Vessel · Premium Collector (No. 201–600) — € 324 (18 × 18).
  • Standard Collector (No. 601–3,000) — € 149.

What the discipline protects

The allocation discipline protects two parties at once. It protects the house, because the object enters an environment where it will be honoured rather than flipped, and because the register of ownership becomes, over time, a cultural asset in itself. It also protects the buyer. A collector who acquires a bottle from an invitation-only allocation is acquiring provenance as well as product — a certificate, a Hebrew document referencing the Tanya in the Holy Numbers Edition, a rabbinical certificate of origin, a numbered position within the three thousand.

The kosher certification sits within the Chabad-Lubavitch tradition and is documented privately to allocated collectors. The certifying rabbi’s name is communicated to the collector and is not printed commercially. This is not a barrier to entry. It is the architecture that preserves the object once it has entered.

How to enter the conversation

The letter, the telephone call, the handshake at the close of an older conversation. The block below carries the two channels through which the house can be reached.