A bottle of whiskey from 1926 reached a million-dollar record price at auction

A bottle of The Macallan 1926, described by Sotheby’s auction house as the “most valuable whiskey in the world”was sold this Saturday for a record number of £2.1 million.

The unusual 75cl bottle was expected to fetch between £750,000 and £1.2m, but beat estimates to fetch £2,187,500 ($2.7m), setting a “new record for any bottle of liquor or wine sold at auction”Sotheby’s said.

One of the 1926 Macallan bottles had set the previous record as the most expensive bottle ever sold in 2019, when it was purchased for £1.5 million at the same London auction house.

Sotheby’s drinks specialist Jonny Fowle said before the sale that he had been allowed to taste the prized whisky. “I tried a little drop. It’s very delicious, It has a lot of nuts as expected, a lot of spicesYes, a lot of wood,” he said.

This Scotch whiskey, with an alcohol content of 42.8º, was distilled in 1926 – Macallan’s oldest vintage – and bottled 60 years later. It was matured in oak barrels, which gave it its characteristic dark color.

The bottle sold this Saturday is the last in a series of 12 that bears a label designed in 1993 by the Italian painter Valerio Adami. One of those 12 bottles would have been destroyed during an earthquake in Japan.

Sotheby’s estimated that the bottle would sell for between 750,000 and 1.2 million pounds (856,000 and 1.4 million euros; 934,000 and 1.5 million dollars).

Only 40 bottles were produced from the barrel from which this whiskey comes.

One of them, a 70 cl, was sold in 2019 for almost 1.5 million pounds (1.9 million dollars at the current exchange rate), setting the current record until today.

“It’s the same liquid” but with “a different label,” Sotheby’s specialist Foyle explained last month, when presenting the bottle of Macallan Adami.

From the bottle sold on Saturday, one milliliter was extracted to carry out tests and compare it with another bottle from the 1926 vintage, and from now on it will be used as a reference for future comparisons.

With agency information