The most expensive whiskey in the world sold: more than 2 million per bottle

The 1926 drink was auctioned at Sotheby’s in London

A rare 1926 Scotch whiskey has sold for a record £2.1 million, earning it the distinction of being the world’s most expensive bottle of spirits.

The record for the most expensive bottle of whiskey in the world has been broken after a 1926 bottle of Macallan sold for £2.1 million at a Sotheby’s auction in London.

According to The Guardian, the sale set a new record for any bottle of liquor or wine sold at auction, the auction house told AFP.

The rare bottle was expected to fetch between £750,000 and £1.2 million, but it beat estimates on Saturday to fetch £2,187,500.

One of the 1926 Macallan bottles set the previous record as the most expensive bottle ever sold in 2019, when it sold at Sotheby’s for £1.5 million, The Guardian recalls.

The head of Sotheby’s whiskey department, Johnny Fowle, told AFP that he was allowed to taste the valuable drink before the sale.

Fowle said: “I tried a tiny drop – just a tiny drop – of this drink. It’s very rich, it’s got a lot of dried fruit as you’d expect, a lot of spice, a lot of wood.”

The auction representative added that the drink had lain for 60 years in dark European oak, which was reflected in the color. “This whiskey is not to be taken lightly. It’s a rich drink, but it’s incredible,” Fowle said.

As The Guardian notes, the 1926 Adami whiskey is the oldest vintage of Macallan ever produced. The drink was bottled after sixty years of aging in sherry casks.

The bottles are among just 40 that Macallan, based in Moray, northern Scotland, confirmed were bottled from cask 263 in 1986.

However, they were not available for purchase and were instead offered to leading Macallan customers.

Records are broken every time something comes up for auction: between 2018 and 2019, the record was broken three times by three different variations: Sir Peter Blake, Michael Dillon and Fine and Rare.

The record-breaking bottle is one of 12 Macallan bottles from 1926 that had labels designed by Italian artist Valerio Adami in 1993. What makes this drink unique is that it was the first to undergo a refurbishment at the Macallan distillery, which included replacing the capsule and cap and taking a 1ml sample of the liquid for comparison with another bottle from 1926 at the Edrington office in Glasgow.