A third bottle of whisky is about to be sold by Bonhams at their sale on 3 October which may break the record price set earlier this year by their Hong Kong auction house.
The first was sold in Hong Kong in May this year for £814,081 which is the highest price ever paid for Scotch whisky at public auction. A second sold in the same sale (with a Peter Blake lable) achieved £751,703 and now the third bottle of Macallan will be auctioned next week and is estimated at around £700,00-900,000.
This bottle is one of only twelve of The Macallan Valerio Adami 1926 ever available. A further twelve bottles bore the Peter Blake label.
It was bottled in 1986 and contains a 60 year old whisky. But what makes it so special, and why was it created in the first place?
Well who better to ask than the man who commissioned the bottling? Willie Phillips was managing director of Macallan in the 1980s and he knows all about it. He has even tasted it.
He told The Edinburgh Reporter : “What really happened was that I was made managing director in 1978, and at the same time a new marketing director, Hugh Metcalfe, was also appointed. He had heard a rumour that Macallan had wonderful old stocks. They came from Glen Grant.
“Hugh was a lawyer by profession and he had a wonderful imagination, much more creative than I was. So we formed a good partnership along with our production director.
“Hugh started off looking at the old stocks, and he came in to see me with the list of stocks and said ‘I can’t believe this! I knew the story of Macallan stocks but I really can’t believe this!’ So I agreed we would use it.
“We used the old whiskies for marketing. We did a standard 10,12,18 year-old and then he came along one day and said there was some nice 25 year-old and he wanted to bring it up to the nosing room to see if it was suitable. So we started off with The Macallan Anniversary malt which was a 25 year-old.
“Then we came across a 50 year old – these were small numbers so there was big publicity with each one. For both of these whiskies we went to an agency in London to design a label.
“David Holmes of Holmes Knight and Ritchie did all our graphic design for our advertising. Our advert used to sit beside The Times crossword. It was just a square and would simply say The Macallan, The Malt.
“So we asked him to do the labels and then we came across the 60 year-old. This was going to be a real event. It was a 60 year-old cask in the warehouse, and then we nosed it. We wondered about bottling it and selling it under The Macallan label, and we were all very happy with the quality so we agreed we could.”
David Holmes is an advertising legend who also designed the Christmas stamps in 2015.
What did the whisky taste like?
Willie said : “Well it was over thirty years ago, but if I remember rightly it was a bit lighter than The Macallan flavour. There was just less of it, and I think that was probably because of the age.
The bottle which is going to auction is still in the original glass presentation case that it was set in when first sold. Willie explained : “They were all sold in a lockable glass case, and that was also designed by David Holmes.”
Willie believes that when the bottles were originally sold they may have retailed at around £15,000, although he is not entirely sure, but he knows it was out of his price range at that time!
Bonhams will sell the Macallan 1926 Valerio Adami on 3 October in Edinburgh.
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