Rare Bottle of Scotch Whisky Auctioned for £848,750

A bottle of whisky for £848,750 or US$1.09 million is something, which can give a thousand hangovers to a normal person, but the truth is yes, a rare bottle of whisky has sold for the world record price recently at an auction in Scotland. 60-year-old, the 1926 Macallan Valerio Adami bottle is regarded as the most expensive whisky in the world and is also described as “the Holy Grail of whisky”. 

The rare auction has attracted the attention of the world’s most serious wine collectors and the rare bottle is successful in earning a hammer price of £700,000, also a buyer’s premium of £148,750. The whisky, Macallan Valerio Adami was created in 1926 and bottled in the year 1986 is expected to fetch between £700,000 and £900,000 at the auction that was held at Bonhams in Edinburgh. 

Martin Green, a whisky specialist said, “I am delighted at this exceptional result. It is a great honour to have established a new world record and particularly exciting to do so here in Scotland, the home of whisky. The Macallan 1926, 60-year-old has been described as the Holy Grail of whisky. Its exceptional rarity and quality puts it in a league of its own and the world’s most serious whisky collectors will wait patiently for many years for a bottle to come on to the market.” 

According to auction house Bonhams, the earlier world record was also set by the auction house in the month of May this year, when another piece of the same bottle also of 1926 was sold for £814,081. Around the same time, Bonhams Hong Kong sold a bottle of the Macallan Peter Blake 1926 60-year-old for £751,703. Thus Bonhams now holds the record for the three most valuable bottles of whisky ever sold at auction.

Macallan has now commissioned two pop artists, Valerio Adami and Peter Blake to design 24 labels for a very limited edition of the whisky, where 12 will carry the label of Adami and other 12 to carry the label of Blake.

Now, it is not known that how many Adami bottles still exist, though one bottle is said to have been destroyed during an earthquake in Japan in the year 2011 and at least one is believed to have been drunk. The bottle, which was sold recently, was bought by the seller directly from the Macallan distillery for an unknown sum in 1994.