In a year that has already been super hot for rare bottles of The Macallan Scotch whisky at auction, another bottle just sold to a collector at an Edinburgh, Scotland whisky sale for a record breaking price. The expression in question is The Macallan Valerio Adami 1926 and the final bid when the gavel fell was £848,750. A grand price for a Macallan Whisky just auctioned at over over $1 million.
The auction, which was held on October 3rd, had as its central focus an expression that is part of a rare series of The Macallan whiskies dating back to the 1920s. Bottled in 1986, the distillery is said by auction house Bonhams to have
commissioned two world-famous Pop Artists – Valerio Adami and Peter Blake – to design labels for a very limited edition of 24 bottles –12 of the Adami and 12 of the Blake labels. The bottle is elegantly presented in a specially commissioned cabinet or Tantalus, based on the traditional ‘Brass and Glass’ distillery spirit safe. It was bought by the vendor direct from the Macallan distillery for an undisclosed sum in 1994 and was part of a wider collection from the same owner offered in the sale.
Although 12 bottles of The Macallan Valerio Adami 1926 were produced, it is not known how many of them still exist. One is said to have been destroyed in an earthquake in Japan in 2011, and it is believed that at least one of them has been opened and drunk.
“I am delighted at this exceptional result,” said Bonhams Whisky specialist in Edinburgh Martin Green in a prepared statement. “It is a great honor to have established a new world record, and particularly exciting to have done so here in Scotland, the home of whisky. Bonhams now holds the record for the three most valuable bottles of whisky ever sold at auction.”
It had originally been projected The Macallan Valerio Adami 1926 would sell in the £700,000-900,000 range. The record it broke was set by one of its siblings just earlier this year in Hong Kong, where it was auctioned off for a cool $1.014 million USD.
For the curious, Valerio Adami (born 1935) is an Italian artist famous for painting bold, flat forms outlined in thick, black lines, in a style reminiscent of comic art. He is among the most acclaimed of 20th Century Pop Artists.
