A bottle of Macallan Fine & Rear 60 Year Old 1926 just sold for $1.9 million at a Sotheby’s auction in London, shattering the record for the world’s most expensive spirit. That’s over $100,000 per shot… a new Porsche 911 Carrera starts at $97,000. It’s the highest price ever paid in public for a bottle of Whisky or any other drink.
Distilled over 90 years ago and aged in European Oak for 60 years, the bottle of Scotch is one of only 40 bottles that Macallan produced from its famed Cask 263 in 1986, which is popularly referred to as the “holy grail” of whisky. Only 14 of those 40 bottles were given the Fine and Rare Label that Thursday’s auction item bore. So far, Cask 263 has produced six record-setting bottles beginning in 1986 when one sold in New York for $6,411, setting the Guinness record for “The World’s Most Expensive Spirit.”
Just last year, three such bottles from the cask broke the world record on separate occasions. First, a bottle with a label designed by Italian artist Valerio Adami (12 of the 40 featured such a label) was sold in Hong Kong in May for $1.02 million. Five months later, another bottle with the same label sold in Edinburgh for $1.06 million. Then in London in November, a one-off bottle hand-painted by Irish artist Michael Dillon sold for $1.5 million. The new bottle, meanwhile, featured a relatively plain Macallan branded label.
Sotheby’s dubbed the auction “The Ultimate Whisky Collection,” and it featured 467 bottles and nine casks from one American collector. In the end, the auction raked in just under $10 million in total.
“The electricity in the auction room was palpable,” said Sotheby’s Spirits Specialist Jonny Fowle in a statement. “There were cheers when the hammer fell on the Macallan Fine and Rare 1926, in what has to be one of the most exciting moments in the history of whisky sales.”
Sotheby’s won’t reveal the identity of the buyer, but said the auction attracted a lot of interest from Asia.