Cheers! Bottle of Scotch sets new world record by selling for more than £2MILLION

A Bottle of whisky dubbed ‘the holy grail of single malts’ set a world auction record yesterday by selling for more than £2 million.

The Macallan Adami 1926 was one of only 12 produced in 1986 by the Speyside distillery.

Yesterday, it broke the previous auction record by more than £700,000 – meaning each of the 28 25ml drams it contains is worth an astonishing £77,857.

The 97-year-old whisky was drawn from the distillery’s legendary cask number 263 and features a label by Italian pop artist Adami.

The bottle, numbered 12/12, went under the hammer at Sotheby’s in London with an estimate of £750,000 to £1.2 million amid interest from collectors around the world.

It was sold to an online bidder after a battle with a rival in the auction room.

Bidding started at £700,000 and the winning bid of £2.18 million was greeted by cheers and applause.

Auctioneer Jonny Fowle, Sotheby’s global head of spirits, toasted the new world record in Gaelic with a ‘Slàinte Mhath’ from the rostrum as the hammer fall.

He said afterwards: ‘This is a package that represents the greatest thing that the Scottish whisky industry can produce and can represent itself with, and I think for any collector this is the ultimate trophy.’

Aged for 60 years, just 40 bottles of The Macallan 1926 were bottled in 1986, at the time representing the oldest Macallan vintage produced.

The distillery commissioned Adami to design the label for 12 ­bottles, with fellow artist Peter Blake designing another label for a further dozen. A maximum of 14 bottles were decorated with the distillery’s Fine and Rare labels, and two bottles were released with no labels at all, one hand-painted by Irish artist Michael Dillon.

Originally bottled to offer as corporate gifts to the distillery’s most valued customers, the whisky has since become recognised as ‘the world’s rarest and most valuable whisky’.

At previous sales it was described as the ‘holy grail of single malts’.

The previous world auction record for any bottle of wine or spirit was set in 2019 when a bottle from the same cask, with the Fine and Rare label, was sold for £1,452,000.