A rare bottle of whisky has broken the record for the most expensive wine or spirit sold at auction.
ADVERTISEMENTThe Macallan 1926 single malt is one of the world's “most sought-after" bottles of Scotch whisky.
It was sold by Sotheby's on Saturday (18 November), at more than double its estimated price, for a record £2.1 million (€2.4m).
It was an increase on the estimate of between £750,000 (€857,000) and £1.2m (€1.3m).
The Macallan Adami whisky was bottled in 1986, 60 years after it began ageing in sherry casks, with only 40 ever produced - 12 of which had labels designed by Italian painter Valerio Adami.
The 40 bottles were reportedly not made available for purchase - instead, some were offered to The Macallan's top clients. Whenever any of the bottles have been auctioned over the years there have been record-breaking results - a similar bottle was sold in 2019 for £1.5 million (€1.7m).
Head of spirits at Sotheby's, Jonny Fowle, said the sale was "nothing short of momentous for the whisky industry".
The bottle sold on Saturday is the first to have been reconditioned by the distillery before it went to auction, which included replacing the cork and applying fresh glue to the corner of the labels.
For people wanting to know what a whisky worth more than €2 million tastes like, Macallan's master whisky maker Kirsteen Campbell said it had notes of "rich dark fruits, black cherry compote alongside sticky dates, followed by intense sweet antique oak".
