Whiskey – Consider Scotland's greatest export
A rare bottle of Scotch whisky, dubbed the “Holy Grail” for whiskey drinkers, was on the verge of being worth £1.2 million when it went up for auction on November 18, 2023. Sotheby's was offering a bottle of Macallan Adami aged 96 years old. Whiskey under the hammer in London. Now in case we all thought the price was a typo, let me reiterate that this bottle of Macallan Adami was actually expected to sell for at least £750,000, but Sotheby's has actually set a guide price of £1.2 million.
What's going on here? Can a bottle of whiskey be that expensive? Come to think of it, can a bottle of anything be that expensive? Did Sotheby's get carried away when they were arranging the auction, or is there something behind all the hype? If it reached that price level, it would make it one of the most expensive bottles ever sold, the previous record being held by another bottle of the same 1926 Macallan Adami which sold for £1.5 million in 2019.
But as things turned out, Sotheby's erred on the conservative side. A 1926 Macallan Adami sold for a record £2.2 million ($2.7 million). One of the reasons it sold for such a large sum is that the Speyside distillery produced only 40 bottles of this drink, and the contents were aged for at least six decades before it was bottled in 1986. These bottles were then offered to major Macallan customers. . It is clear to me that, whether one likes whiskey or not, this would have been one of the best financial investments anyone could make. Provided, of course, that the owner is able to resist the temptation to open the bottle and drink it.
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