(CNN) — bottle of “whiskey “The world’s most sought-after Scotch” sold for more than 2.1 million pounds ($2.7 million) on Saturday at Sotheby’s in London.
The Macallan 1926 is one of 40 bottles extracted after aging in sherry casks for 60 years, making it the oldest Macallan vintage ever produced. According to the auction house.
Sotheby’s expected to raise between £750,000 and £1.2 million (US$934,274 and US$1.4 million), but was surprised when the precious bottle sold for £2,187,500 (US$2,724,967), making it a “record “new”. “For any bottle of liquor or wine sold at auction,” the auction house told AFP news agency.
This bottle of The Macallan 1926 is one of 12 named by Italian painter Valerio Adami.
Tristan Fewings/Getty Images
Ahead of the auction, Johnny Fowle, Sotheby’s whiskey director, told AFP he had tasted a small sample.
“I tried a little drop, a little drop, of this. It’s very rich, a lot of nuts as you would expect, a lot of spice, a lot of wood,” he added, calling it an “amazing” whiskey that should not be taken lightly.
Of the 40 bottles filled in 1986, none were available for purchase, and some were offered to The Macallan’s top clients, a luxury that adds to their appeal, as evidenced by previous sales of the bottles, their description on the website adds. .
In 2019, Sotheby’s sold a bottle of… Macallan 1926 Decorated with one of 14 luxury and rare labels, it fetched £1.5 million (US$1.9 million), making it at the time the most expensive bottle of wine or spirit ever sold at auction.
Saturday’s auction was one of 12 bottles covered with a label designed by Italian painter Valerio Adami, a bottle also believed to have been destroyed during the 2011 Japan earthquake. This bottle is also the first of the 1926 Macallan bottles to be restored and carried. It was churned out by The Macallan Distillery in Scotland prior to the auction.
A further 12 were tagged by pop artist Sir Peter Blake, while the remaining two were released untagged. Of those without a sticker, one was hand-painted by Irish artist Michael Dillon and became The first bottle of whiskey worth more than one million pounds The auction house said on its website that the painting was ($1.2 million) when it was sold in 2018 for 1.2 million pounds ($1.5 million).
