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Macallan 1926 breaks auction record at £1.5m

A bottle of Macallan 1926 60-year-old Scotch whisky has set a new world record after fetching £1.5 million (US$1.9m) at auction.

The 60-year-old Macallan 1926 from cask #263 has set a new world record

The 60-year-old Macallan from cask #263 was the headline sale of the Ultimate Whisky Collection auction, which was held by Sotheby’s in London today (24 October). More than 460 bottles have gone on sale during the auction, including 178 bottlings from The Macallan Fine & Rare series.

The Macallan Fine & Rare 60 Year Old 1926 bottle (42.6% ABV) was offered for auction by a private American collector and had been estimated to sell for £350,000-£450,000 (US$450,000-US$578,000) – less than a third of the final auction price.

The 60-year-old bottle is the first to appear from the Fine and Rare series in more than a decade.

It breaks the previous world record for the most expensive whisky set by the only bottle of the 1926 Macallan featuring a hand-painted design by Irish artist Michael Dillon. The bottle went under the hammer at Christie’s in London and sold for £1.2m (US$1.5m) at auction.

Cask #263 yielded only 40 bottles and The Macallan commissioned two leading pop artists, Valerio Adami and Peter Blake, to design the labels for just 24 bottles, equally split between the pair.

Two more bottles were sold individually and given private labels, one of which was hand-painted by Dillon.

The remaining 14 bottles were adorned with a Fine & Rare label and are the oldest in the Fine & Rare series by age and vintage.

A bottle of The Macallan Valerio Adami 1926 60-year-old Scotch whisky once held the world record for most expensive whisky sold at auction after fetching £848,750 (US$1.1m) at a Bonhams sale in Edinburgh last year.

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