TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Scotch tipped to break booze record at $1 million plus
The whisky aged 60 years in a casket at Scottish distillery The Macallan before being bottled in 1986, its maturing process complete.
Change Size
The Macallan 1926, a 60-year-old whisky, with a label by artist Sir Peter Blake, is on display at Sotheby's in New york, on October 12, 2018. The bottle is to be auctioned on October 13 and is expected to fetch $700,000 to $1.2 million, possibly making it the world's priciest whisky. (AFP/Thomas Urbain)
A
bottle of Scotch dating back to 1926 is tipped to set a new record in New York on Saturday for most expensive bottle of alcohol sold at auction, valued at up to $1.2 million by Sotheby's.
The whisky aged 60 years in a casket at Scottish distillery The Macallan before being bottled in 1986, its maturing process complete.
The Macallan, in Craigellachie, northern Scotland only ever produced 40 bottles from the 1926 vintage that had matured for 60 years.
Twelve of them -- Saturday's lot included -- were given a label by English pop artist Peter Blake, best known for co-designing the cover of 1967 Beatles album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".
The label references key events in 1926 such as the attempted assassination of Italian Fascist ruler Benito Mussolini and the death of Hollywood actor Rudolph Valentino.
Read also: Rare bottle of Scotch whisky fetches record price
Sotheby's estimates the value of the bottle at between $700,000 and $1.2 million, with three other Macallan 1926 bottles sold at auction in the last six months for just over a million dollars each.
"The reason it is so special is because it combines rarity and quality," says Jamie Ritchie, worldwide head of Sotheby's Wine.
By comparison, the auction record for a standard sized bottle of wine is $223,000, paid for a 1869 Chateau Lafite-Rothschild in Hong Kong in 2010.
The same year, a six-liter bottle of Cheval Blanc 1947 fetched $304,000 at auction in Geneva.
The recent flurry of headline-grabbing whisky actions are benefiting from a drink increasingly popular around the world and valued increasingly highly by the super-rich in Asia.
The Macallan is "very, very concentrated, rich, viscous spirit which has a great capacity to age and to give complexity in the whisky," says Ritchie.
