A bottle of the world’s most expensive whisky sold at a London auction on Saturday for over two million pounds, according to Sotheby’s, outstripping a previous record set in 2019.
The 75cl bottle of Macallan 1926 exchanged hands for £2,187,500 (2.5 million euros), setting a new auction record for a liquor bottle, noted Sotheby’s.
Maturation journey of the vintage Macallan
Distilled in 1926, the Scotch whisky was bottled six decades later after maturing in oak barrels, which gives it its dark hue. It is the oldest vintage of Macallan.
Saturday’s sale could be the final one from a series of 12 bottles featuring a label drawn in 1993 by Italian painter Valerio Adami. One of these bottles reportedly perished in a Japanese earthquake.
Sotheby’s had estimated a selling price of between £750,000 and £1.2 million for this particular bottle, whose cork and capsule were replaced this year by the distillery.
This whisky, with a strength of 42.8%, originated from Macallan cask number 263, yielding just 40 bottles.
Shattering past records
In 2019, one of these 70cl bottles sold for close to £1.5 million (around 1.7 million euros), surpassing the previous record set a year earlier for a bottle from the same batch.
“The liquid is the same, but the label is different,” said Sotheby’s whisky specialist Jonny Foyle during a presentation of the Macallan Adami bottle last month.
A millilitre of the whisky sold on Saturday underwent testing, comparing it to another 1926 vintage bottle. It now serves as a benchmark for future comparisons.
