2023-11-18 17:28:02
A bottle of the world’s most expensive whiskey sold for more than two million pounds sterling at auction in London on Saturday, beating a previous record set in 2019, according to auction house Sotheby’s.
Sold for 2,187,500 pounds sterling (2.5 million euros), this 75 cl bottle of Macallan 1926 sets a new auction record for a bottle of wines and spirits, according to Sotheby’s. This Scottish whiskey distilled in 1926 was bottled 60 years later following maturation in oak barrels, from which it gets its dark color. This is Macallan’s oldest vintage.
The bottle sold on Saturday might be the last in a series of 12 to feature a label designed in 1993 by the Italian painter Valerio Adami. One of these 12 bottles was apparently destroyed during an earthquake in Japan.
Sotheby’s had published an estimate between 750,000 and 1.2 million pounds sterling for this bottle, whose cork and capsule were replaced this year by the distillery.
This whiskey (42.8°) comes from Macallan cask n°263, of which only 40 bottles were produced. One of them, 70 cl, was sold for nearly 1.5 million pounds (around 1.7 million euros) in 2019, beating the previous record established the previous year by a bottle from the same barrel.
“It’s the same liquid” but with “a different label,” Jonny Foyle, whiskey manager at Sotheby’s, explained last month during the presentation of the bottle of Macallan Adami.
The specialist was able to savor a “very small drop” of this “incredible” whisky: “it is very rich”, with lots of “dried fruit”, “spice”, “wood” flavors.
A milliliter of whiskey was extracted from the bottle sold on Saturday to conduct tests and compare it to another bottle of 1926 vintage, and it now serves as a yardstick for further comparisons in the future.
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