A bottle of The Macallan 1926, described by Sotheby's auction house as the "world's most valuable whisky", sold for a record £2.1 million on Saturday.
The unusual 75cl bottle was expected to fetch between £750,000 and £1.2 million, but it beat estimates to fetch £2,187,500 ($2.7 million), setting a "new record for any bottle of liquor or wine sold at auction," Sotheby's said.
One of Macallan's 1926 bottles had set the previous record as the most expensive bottle ever sold in 2019, when it was acquired for £1.5 million at the same London auction house
Sotheby's beverage specialist Jonny Fowle said before the sale that he had been allowed to taste the prized whisky. "I tasted a droplet. It's very tasty, it has a lot of nuts as you would expect, a lot of spices, a lot ofwood," he said.
This 42.8º alcohol content Scotch whisky 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 colour.
The bottle sold Saturday is the latest in a series of 12 to bear a label designed in 1993 by Italian painter Valerio Adami. One of those 12 bottles was reportedly destroyed during an earthquake in Japan.
Sotheby's estimated the bottle would sell for between £750,000 million and £1.2 million ($856,000 and €1.4 million; €934,000 and $1.5 million).
From the barrel from which this whisky comes, only 40 bottles were produced.
One of them, 70 cl, was sold in 2019 for almost 1.5 million pounds ($1.9 million at current exchange rates), setting the record that stands to this day
"It's the same liquid" but with "a different label," the Sotheby's Foyle specialist explained last month, when presenting the Macallan Hami bottle.
One milliliter was extracted from the bottle sold on Saturday for testing and comparison with another bottle from the 1926 vintage, and will now be used as a reference for future comparisons.
With information from agencies
DB