Rare Whisky Up for Auction Is Pretty Pricey

Sotheby's estimates the bottle can fetch up to $1.5M
By Gina Carey,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 22, 2023 6:39 AM CDT
World's Priciest Whisky Up for Auction
Only 40 bottles of Scotch whisky Macallan 1926 were produced.   (Sotheby's)

There are only 40 bottles of the Macallan Adami 1926, a Scotch whisky that spent 60 years aging in sherry casks, and someone is about to be the lucky owner of one of them. Per the Drink Business, Sotheby's has one of the rare bottles up for auction, and pre-sale prices estimate it could bring in somewhere between $900,000 to $1.5 million. This limited beverage is the oldest vintage ever produced by Macallan, and after it was bottled in 1986, it was only available to the brand's top clientele. Only some of the bottles were available for sale, and they're not all still full. One is believed to have been opened and consumed (based on photos taken of that very special occasion), and another was likely destroyed in a 2011 earthquake in Japan.

The whisky's packaging has a few variations that make it even more intriguing to collectors. Sotheby's' Macallan 1926 comes with a label designed in 1993 by an Italian painter, Valerio Adami. Some bottles were adorned with 'Fine and Rare' labels, while two had no labels, one of which was hand-painted by Irish artist Michael Dillon. The other label-less bottle is unaccounted for. Another dozen bottles were labeled by pop artist Sir Peter Blake, depicting black and white sketches and photos of the Roaring '20s. Sotheby's describes the Macallan Adami 1926 as "the world's most valuable whisky," and is pretty stoked to sell it, with their global head of spirits calling it "the one whisky that every auctioneer wants to sell and every collector wants to own." (More auction stories)

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