In the basement of a forgotten lounge, an exceptionally rare and expensive bottle of whiskey beckons travelers to Seward, Alaska.
To comprehend—or at least begin to try to comprehend—the $80,000 bottle of booze on a Seward bar’s menu, it’s worth considering how Alaska’s promise has lured the intrepid, generation after generation.
Arctic terns, seabirds weighing no more than a baseball, take wing for 25,000 miles, following the sun from Antarctica; humpback whales navigate thousands of ocean miles from Hawaii and Mexico for a buffet of shrimp-like krill each summer; and humans across the decades have purloined Alaska’s riches—furs, gold, oil—while braving the unknown.
But some people, quite simply, are chasing as-yet undefined dreams.
So it was that KellyAnn Cavaretta and Matt Cope arrived in Seward on a sunny, 55-degree day in September 2015, not knowing a soul. Cope always captained the stick shift of their four-wheeled home: a silver, road-spattered 2004 Toyota RAV4 laden with a roof box atop and a bike rack behind.
The RAV4 had already shuttled them from their San Diego starting point down to Baja California, then up along Western states and through Canada to Alaska’s Denali National Park and Preserve. They waited tables and sold excursion tickets, hustling summer spending money to finance their off-season exploration.
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“We left San Diego because we knew if we didn’t, we’d never own a house, and we’d always work for someone else,” Cavaretta explains.
But everywhere they went—be it Moab, Jackson Hole, or Bend—they felt tapped out, too late by years. In Seward, little more than a two-hour drive south of Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city, something clicked. They hiked the spectacular Harding Icefield Trail in Kenai Fjords National Park, spotting pink and purple fireweed, two bear cubs playing, and lit a bayside fire, and watched a whale surface in the distance.
“We found we liked this place,” Cavaretta says. They returned the following year, and though their nomadic lifestyle continued, Seward kept calling them back, finally for good in 2019.
By 2022, they had not made it, exactly, but were definitely gaining traction. They married, aggregated a gaggle of new friends, and had a baby boy, Atticus. Thankfully, their rented home wasn’t something that required DMV registration, but business debts regularly reminded them of their presence, like an insistent wind whistling at the window.
They opened a small inn, Salted Roots, using borrowed money. They paddled past the pandemic’s economic maelstrom, parlayed their new friendships and boundless energy into even more loans, and bought a shuttered bar/restaurant in downtown Seward: The Flamingo Lounge, they called it, an ode to days gone by.
There, in the ruinously cluttered basement, Cope rummaged around, week after week. Over three decades, the previous owner and his crew had strewn liquor bottles, collectible decanters, and boxes by the thousands. Most had been pillaged, but some appeared untouched.
The porcelain decanters, a product of the Baby Boom’s booze marketing heyday, littered floors and shelves like some sort of 80-proof architectural dig. Chessmen. Knights in armor. Polar bears. Cowboys.
Working gingerly, Cope meandered from shelf to shelf, bottle to bottle, box to box. He had a working knowledge of rare whiskeys and their bottles. However, he freely acknowledges that if this basement constituted the Tanis of liquor lore, he would be miscast as Indiana Jones.
Still, he knew enough that when he spied the faded red shape peeking out from behind some boxes on the floor, it demanded closer examination. Then he opened the box. And not unlike Charlie Bucket glimpsing gold’s glimmer inside a chocolate wrapper, he could not trust his eyes.
Inside rested an unopened bottle of Rémy Martin Louis XIII cognac, dating to the 1960s or 1970s. This copper-colored French brandy, named for a monarch and twice-distilled from grapes picked generations before, then aged in oak barrels, became a regal prize among scores of unopened vintage bottles Cope found in the basement haul.
“It’s not entirely unusual to come across old bars and liquor stores with forgotten stashes,” says Adam Herz, a Los Angeles-area screenwriter/producer and whiskey authority. “But this place has some fun, great history, and a lot of whiskey collectors are enthusiastic about the fanfare, the mystique, the lore. It’s not just about the bourbon—they want to hear the stories.”
This, then, is a tale of how Seward hooked a couple of vagabonds and how they are helping spawn a city’s rebirth where the Resurrection River deposits its gray, silty glacial runoff into Resurrection Bay.
Big Dreams Worthy of Its Namesake
At the dawn of the 20th century, Seattle businessman John E. Ballaine cast his gaze north, plotting a railway to connect Alaska’s interior to a new all-year Pacific Ocean port. So lucrative were the prospects of transporting Alaskan coal and timber, plus gold from Canada’s booming Klondike fields, that Ballaine sought a port land area adequate to “accommodate an ultimate population of not less than 500,000.”
At the time, the harbor on Resurrection Bay was beyond obscure but had found favor in U.S. Army geological reports. Alexander Baranov, a Russian fur trader and merchant, lent the deep, glacier-carved bay its name in 1792 while sheltering there during an Easter Sunday storm.
A railway engineer proposed naming the new terminus Vituska, blending the first name of Danish mapmaker and explorer Vitus Bering (yes, that Bering, as in Bering Strait) with Alaska’s last syllable. Ballaine interceded, saying that a place destined to be “one of the half dozen largest cities on the Pacific Coast” deserved no less than the name of William Seward, the U.S. secretary of state who authored Alaska’s 1867 purchase from Russia.
Over the objections of postal inspectors, who argued that territorial Seward townships were proliferating like weeds, President Teddy Roosevelt personally endorsed the name in 1903 at Ballaine’s behest. Seward was born.
Ballaine’s Alaska Central Railway went belly up in 1909, however, after completing roughly 50 miles of track. It paved the way for today’s Alaska Railroad, purchased by the state in 1985. It extends 656 miles in total, connecting Seward to Fairbanks, and carries 3.5 million tons of freight annually. The railroad also typically transports a half-million passengers a year. Combined with more than 100 cruise ship visits annually, Seward serves as a tourism transfer point to the ultra-popular Denali.
The compact city of roughly 2,600 residents never realized Ballaine’s vision of a booming metropolis. Its longtime image—a way station rather than a destination—has emerged as a rallying point for Seward’s champions, who appeal more to independent travelers than cruise ship passengers.
‘We Don’t Want to Be a Disneyland’
In summer, Seward is an easy sell by land, sea, and air. It’s the inhospitable winters and their short days, however, that have primarily impeded Seward’s evolution. Much of the town shuts down in winter.
“We don’t want to be a Disneyland version of a small Alaska town,” says Micheley Kowalski, owner of Resurrect Art Coffee House and Dreamland Books & Yarn. “We want to stay authentic and be a real, year-round community rather than just cater to summer cruise-ship passengers.”
Kowalski credits Cavaretta and Cope with smart, aesthetically pleasing projects–like the fun, funky, cozy A-frames at their original inn, including one with a retro bus wedged into the space. The couple opened the inn in March 2020—the pandemic’s dawn—and navigated the economic challenges by catering to families and locals from nearby Anchorage and offering year-round attractions, like a winter wellness package including yoga and massage.
They invested themselves in the community. Cavaretta took a job as a small business advisor at the Chamber of Commerce. Cope is the Rotary Club of Seward’s past president and is working on establishing a children’s museum.
One of their main motivations for transforming the old Thorn’s Showcase Lounge into the Flamingo Lounge was to fortify Seward’s year-round restaurant presence. Most dining places close in winter.
They spent days scrubbing nicotine off the walls but preserving the lounge’s 1960s red-Naugahyde vibe. They instituted a steakhouse menu and craft cocktails and planned to build a speakeasy in the basement where the vintage spirits survived.
Leaf through what is labeled the “Basement Booze” bar menu, and just below some rare samples of 50-plus-year-old bourbons, ranging in price from $25 to $350 for 2-ounce pours, leaps out the eye-popping $80,000 price tag for the single bottle of Rémy Martin cognac.
Internationally recognized whiskey collectors like Herz, who helped found the Los Angeles Whiskey Society in 2006, suggest that the market price on older Rémy Martin cognacs, based on recent auctions, is closer to a few thousand dollars. Edgar Harden, founder and director of the London-based Old Spirits Company, concurs. The couple consulted with Harden in early 2023 about him potentially training staff–it never came to fruition–in spirit stories. How many of a certain bottle were made? Why in the shape of this car or that animal?
“They wanted to make sure they understood a lot of the history,” Harden said. “To sell to guests, storytelling is the big thing.”
From Harden’s perspective, Cope and Cavaretta stumbled across a kind of Egyptian tomb, with some of the vintage Old Fitzgerald bourbons among the great finds, even more than the cognac.
Cope and Cavaretta hold time on their side with years of old spirits in supply and say the marketplace will ultimately decide the cognac bottle’s true market value. Plus, they offer an experience, not just a bottle: When the Rémy Martin sells, they’ll close the entire place for the buyer’s nightlong dinner party worthy of an Alaska-size retelling.
American historian Walter R. Borneman has done as well as anyone to shoehorn the state into a paragraph, writing, “Look at a map of Alaska. What you notice first and what remains with you long afterward, is the scale. Here is a land where superlatives abound and comparisons are few.”
In this state, city, and reconstituted room, the cloudy dreams of Cavaretta and Cope slowly realized their form. They just bought their first home and are running their own businesses.
Decorative decanters by the dozens line the Flamingo Lounge’s walls, waiting to witness the cognac bottle’s night of revelry. Once filled with spirits, they are now just empty vessels. Mostly, anyway: Cope knows to a certainty, having seen the requisite paperwork governing human remains and real estate transactions, that at least three decanters house former patrons’ ashes.
There they sit, suspended in time, awaiting another resurrection.
