“Is a Picasso that much better than a Chagall? Why is a Picasso worth $150 million and a Chagall is worth $10 million, or whatever it is,” he asks. So how much of the value comes from the quality of the actual liquid inside? Hyman says it’s not so easy to quantify. The Macallan 1926 has transcended its original purpose to become something else: a collector’s item, an investment, art. It doesn’t have the same sort of brand recognition.”Īnd the current fervor is self-perpetuating: The more excited people get about a rare Macallan, the higher the prices go, and the higher the prices go, the more excited people get. The Macallan, a distillery in Speyside, Scotland, just outside the village of Craigellachie, has long been considered to produce “one of the best single malts ever.” There are other 60-year-old bottles, from other excellent distilleries, but while “the liquid is considered as good as Macallan in a lot of instances,” McGlone says, “it would never hit the kind of money that Macallan will hit. “Macallan is in a completely different price league from everything else because it is the collectible whisky.” “As with everything else, you could probably get a Kmart handbag for pennies, whereas one from Gucci or Versace will cost considerably more,” McGlone says. It’s a slow, slow process, and there is nothing you can do to make it faster as a result, it commands a certain price, which only climbs higher due to the extremely limited supply.Īnd then there is the Macallan name. “There’s no shortcut in whisky to make good product.” If, today, you decide you want to make 60-year-old whisky, then you have to let it age for.
“It’s all down to rarity,” McGlone says of Macallan’s price.
“It’s the only one.” The key factors of the price tag: rarity, age, and brand “It’s literally one-of-a-kind,” McGlone tells me. The bottle set to sell at Christie’s is even rarer than those, though, because the label is hand-painted by the Irish artist Michael Dillon. We don’t actually know where all those bottles are, or if they’re even all intact: According to the New York Times, one of the Adami bottles might have been destroyed in a Japanese earthquake in 2011, and at least one other “may have been opened and drunk,” presumably at a time when it was worth a slightly less astronomical amount. The one up next week at Sotheby’s is a Blake. The bottle that sold last week in Edinburgh was an Adami. Twelve of those bottles had labels by the Italian pop artist Valerio Adami another 12 had labels by British artist Peter Blake, who is particularly famous for co-creating the album cover art for the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Only 40 bottles were ever produced.Īnd it gets rarer thanks to the packaging.
These record-breaking bottles - not just the one that sold last week in Edinburgh, or the one slated for auction at Christie’s in November, but the pair that broke records in Dubai in April (purchased at the Dubai Airport) and another pair that broke records in May (at a Bonham’s auction in Hong Kong), and the bottle that will hit the block at Sotheby’s in New York next week (high estimate: $1.2 million) - all contain the same whisky: the Macallan 1926, which was aged 60 years before being bottled, with what Christie’s calls “appropriate reverence,” in 1986. What is less clear, to a whisky outsider: Why are people buying it? What do you do with a $1 million-plus bottle of whisky? And what does a $40,000 pour actually taste like? Macallan 1926 ranges from rare to one-of-a-kind That’s great news if you are looking to offload a bottle of Macallan. I don’t know if the price for this one will ever be beaten.” “It’s the rarest bottle of whisky in the world. “It’s literally the holy grail,” says Sean McGlone, managing director at Whisky Auctioneer, a Perth-based online auction house, of the soon-to-sell Macallan. Assuming everything proceeds as expected, the bottle, Bloomberg reports, could “crack the 1 million pounds mark,” or just over $1.3 million. A 750-milliliter bottle of single-malt 60-year-old Macallan 1926 whisky sold last week at Bonham’s in Edinburgh for a record price of 848,800 pounds, or just over $1.1 million.īut no one expects it will hold the record for long, because less than 24 hours after it sold - for the price, the New York Times notes, of a small Scottish castle - Christie’s unveiled a bottle of even rarer single-malt 60-year-old Macallan whisky, which is set for auction in November and will likely go for even more.
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