Blockbuster: Macallan Bottle Sells for $2.7 million, Smashing Previous Record (2024)

A single bottle of Macallan sold for $2.7 million at Sotheby’s in London over the weekend—setting a new world record for the most expensive bottle of whisky ever sold at auction.

The item in question is the highly coveted Macallan Valerio Adami 1926 60 year old. It’s one of 40 bottles of Macallan 1926 60 year old, an expression released by the distillery in 1986. Fourteen bottles were given a Macallan Fine & Rare label, and this version previously held the record as the most valuable bottling. A dozen bottles received labels designed by British pop artist Sir Peter Blake who is most famous for creating the cover art for The Beatles album “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band.” A further 12 were adorned with labels created by Italian artist Valerio Adami, recommended by Macallan’s Italian importer at the time. The remaining 2 bottles were unlabeled, though one of these bottles was hand painted by Michael Dillon to show the Macallan estate and was sold at auction in 2018.

The winning bid was £1.75 million ($2.2 million) and with 25% premiums added, this bottle sold for a total of $2,724,908—more than double the previous high achieved for the Macallan Valerio Adami set in 2020 and making this the highest auction price ever paid for a bottle of wine or spirits. Only 10 of the Valerio Adami bottles still exist.

The sale was made at Sotheby’s Weekend of Whisky auction in London November 17-18. Sotheby’s head of spirits Jonny Fowle brought the hammer down on the winning phone bid—following a lively competition against a rival bidder in the saleroom.

As for the whisky itself, the cork, capsule, and labels had been reconditioned by the distillery, with a sample of the whisky checked against a reference sample for authenticity. That gave Macallan master whisky maker Kirsteen Campbell a chance to nose the liquid, “The whisky had an incredible depth of character,” she said in a statement. “Rich, dark fruits, black cherry compote alongside sticky dates, followed by intense sweet antique oak, which for me is a recognizable note of such aged Macallan. Dark chocolate, treacle, ginger…the notes go on and on.”

By our calculation, a 1oz. pour from this bottle would cost $107,449.

The sale marks the eighth time a bottle of whisky has sold for over a million dollars at auction. That means it has taken less than six years since the dawn of the million-dollar Macallan era in 2018 to arrive at the world’s first $2 million dollar whisky. Given this new record, the prospect of a $3 million whisky in the not-too-distant future is not inconceivable.

This table shows every million-dollar Macallan ever sold thus far:

jmccormick Collecting News Auctions Macallan Sotheby's trending Macallan Valerio Adami 1926 60 year old