The £1m bottle of whisky!
(or a sobering £33K for a dram)
A BOTTLE of Scotch whisky dubbed the ‘holy grail of single malts’ has sold for £1million at auction.
The Macallan 1926 Fine and Rare 60-year-old is the first bottle to reach a seven-figure sum at a Scottish auction and the first to hit the landmark sum in an onlineonly sale.
It was the leading lot in ‘The Perfect Collection Part 2’, sold by Perth-based Whisky Auctioneer.
The collection comprised 1,958 bottles of rare whiskies collected by the late American businessman Richard Gooding.
The whisky lover spent 35 years travelling to Scotland seeking Scotch from every distillery, open or closed.
The bottle was one of only 14 of its kind from the Moray distillery’s legendary cask number 263, the world’s most celebrated whisky cask.
The Spanish oak sherry hogshead was filled in 1926 and the drink was allowed to mature for 60 years before being bottled in 1986.
Only 40 bottles were produced and just 14 of them were graced with the Fine and Rare label and packaging that features on the new world-record bottle.
Macallan asked pop artist Sir Peter Blake, who co-created the cover of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album, to design a label for a dozen bottles and a further 12 had labels designed by Italian painter Valerio Adami.
Two bottles from the cask were left without labels. One was later hand-painted by Irish artist Michael Dillon and became the first whisky to make £1million when it was sold at Christie’s in November 2018.
The current world record for a bottle of whisky at auction stands at £1.2million (£1,452,000 including premiums) for a bottle from the same release, sold at Sotheby’s in October 2019. It was the first with the Fine and Rare label seen at auction in more than a decade.
Mr Gooding, who died in 2014, was the former owner of soft drink distributor the Pepsi Cola Bottling Company. During his life, he amassed 3,890 bottles at his home in Denver, Colorado.
The first 1,932 bottles were sold by Whisky Auctioneer in February last year for a total of £3.2million.
The highlight was a Macallan Valerio Adami 1926 60year-old, which sold for a hammer price of £825,000 – the first bottle of Scotch to break the $1million (£700,000) mark in an online sale.
Part two of the sale was initially launched in April last year but postponed after the auction site was targeted in a cyber attack.
Speaking ahead of the rearranged sale, Whisky Auctioneer founder Iain McClune said: ‘Undoubtedly the entire collection is crowned by the incomparable Macallan 1926 Fine and Rare, a whisky that has in recent years become the pinnacle of whisky collecting, and for good reason.’
He added: ‘This auction was solely dedicated to one collector’s magnificent library of whisky – a man who was dedicated to building the perfect collection.
‘As enthusiasts of whisky ourselves, we knew that this collection deserved its own spotlight to allow us to truly convey the rarity and sheer scale of something so historic.’
He said Mr Gooding’s entire collection had sold for more than $9million (£6.3million), adding: ‘It has been a privilege for us to share Mr Gooding’s legacy with the world.’
‘Pinnacle of collecting’