A bottle of The Macallan 1926 Fine & Rare has sold for £2,125,000 ($2,807,975) at the first auction ever held at The Macallan Estate in Speyside. The Sotheby’s sale makes it the second most valuable whisky sold in sterling and the most valuable ever sold at auction when measured in US dollars.
The whisky was distilled in 1926, so this year marks its centenary, and it was bottled in 1986 at 60 years old. Forty bottles were drawn from sherry-seasoned oak cask number 263, the oldest vintage The Macallan has bottled. Fourteen carry the Fine & Rare label, 12 were designed by Sir Peter Blake, 12 by the Italian artist Valerio Adami and two were left unlabelled. One of those two, hand-painted by the Irish artist Michael Dillon, became the first whisky to sell for more than £1 million in 2018. The other is the last unlabelled 1926 in existence.
The same vintage fetched £2,187,500 ($2,714,250) at a sale in 2023. The previous record for a Fine & Rare bottling was £1.5 million ($1.9 million), set at Sotheby’s London in 2019, and the new price beat that by roughly $900,000. Sotheby’s now holds the top three auction prices for whisky. Jonny Fowle, the auction house’s global head of whisky and spirits, described the 1926 as “the benchmark for rarity, provenance and desirability in whisky”.
Every one of the 42 lots sold, raising £3.3 million ($4.4 million) against a pre-sale estimate of £2.4 million to £3.2 million, and 86 per cent of lots went above their high estimates. That makes it Sotheby’s second most valuable whisky auction, behind The Ultimate Whisky Collection in 2019. A complete set of the Lalique Six Pillars decanters, released between 2005 and 2016, made £350,000, the second highest price of the day. The Reach 81 Years Old sold for £131,250, and a Lalique Golden Age of Travel Ocean Liner from a 1937 vintage reached £106,250, three times its estimate.
The auction opened with the Romantica Collection, a three-bottle set unveiled in May to mark the centenary with artwork by Blake, Adami and Dillon. It sold for £162,500, and the money will be split equally between Graeae Theatre Company in London, Cancer Research UK and Associazione VIDAS in Milan. About 50 invited collectors attended in person while others bid online and by phone. Jaume Ferras, creative director of The Macallan, said: “It was a privilege to welcome Sotheby’s and guests to our home.”
