NEWS
AN ADAMI MACALLAN 1926 JUST SOLD FOR £2.18M, LAST KNOWN SALES PRICE WAS £0.825M
By Siulan Law Mathews DipWSET
20-11-2023
Source: Sotheby's
One of the 40 bottles of Macallan 1926 60YO, dubbed “the holy grail of single malts”, set a world auction record of £2.18 million (USD2.7m) at a London auction over the weekend.
The bottle, numbered 12/12, is one of the 12 that carried the Valerio Adami designed label. It was estimated by auction house Sotheby’s to be worth between £750,000 to £1.2m ahead of the auction.
Bidding started at £700,000 and the winning bid from an online bidder of £2.18m was greeted by cheers and applause.
The last auction record of Adami designed Macallan 1926 was in February 2020 when a bottle was sold for £825,000.
That price was 31.25 percent lower than the £1.2m achieved by another bottle that carries the Macallan Fine and Rare label sold in October 2019.
Only 40 bottles of 1926 Macallan 60YO were ever released, of them only twelve have Valerio Adami designed labels and one was said to have been lost in the 2011 earthquake in Japan.
Auctioneer Jonny Fowle, Sotheby’s global head of spirits, said: “This is a package that represents the greatest thing that the Scottish whisky industry can produce and can represent itself with, and I think for any collector this is the ultimate trophy.”
These 40 bottles were filled from Macallan’s legendary cask number 263 in 1986 after 60 years of ageing.
The distillery commissioned Adami to design the label for 12 bottles, with fellow artist Peter Blake designing another label for a further 12.
A maximum of 14 bottles were decorated with the distillery’s Fine and Rare labels, and two bottles were released with no labels at all, one hand-painted by Irish artist Michael Dillon.
Originally bottled to offer as corporate gifts to the distillery’s most valued customers, the bottles have since become recognised as the world’s rarest and most valuable whisky.
(the writer can be contacted at: info@thewinechronicle.com)
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