Buying for the bottle

For collectors of spirits, it’s not always just about what lies within. The bottle can also add significant value. Colombia’s Dictador rum is known for its beautifully crafted bottle collections, as Simon Aron showed me with his hand-painted examples when I visited the Cask Trade office in London. Last year, the distillery unveiled its M-City Golden Cities series, for sale by invitation only. Each of the one-litre bottles, which are created by Polish artist M-City and fashioned from 24-carat gold, is unique and costs upwards of $1.5m. Once sales of the bottles reach $1bn in total, the series will be brought to an end. Other bottles in its recent Totem series use patterns by Colombian artists.

The artsy movement is not confined to rum. Bottles of Macallan 1926 Fine And Rare 60-year-old (the type that set the £1.5m auction record for a single bottle) bearing labels by artists Peter Blake and Valerio Adami have sold for over $1m at auction. In a similar vein, the Bowmore whisky distillery teamed up with luxury car marque Aston Martin in 2021 to create 100 futuristic-looking bottles, called the Bowmore Arc-52. Sotheby’s in London will be selling a special, one-off “Mokume Edition” decanter next Friday (pictured, above). It takes its name from the Japanese metalworking technique mokume-gane, which produces a mixedmetal laminate with distinctive layered patterns. The carbon fibre top of the decanter mimics this.

The whisky inside is a blend of some of the oldest Bowmore vintages from the 1960s, created by the distillery’s master blender Ron Welsh. Like the bottle, it is also unique. The Bowmore Arc-52 Mokume Edition has a presale-estimate of £140,000-£220,000 and the proceeds will go towards a long-term fund to support the people of Islay and the island’s distilling industry for the future.