Less than 24 hours after a 60-year-old Macallan Scotch whisky sold for £848,800 (US$1.1 million) on Oct. 4 at Bonhams in Edinburgh, auction-house rival Christie’s unveiled a single malt from the same vintage that could crack the £1 million mark next month.
Meanwhile, Sotheby’s is putting its own bottle from that cask, filled in 1926, on the block in New York on Oct. 12 with a high estimate of US$1.2 million.
The 194-year-old Macallan distillery, on the banks of the River Spey in Scotland, calls this vintage the “holy grail” of whiskies, bottled in 1986 after six decades in an oak cask. Only about 40 bottles were made and none have appeared at auction in more than a decade.
Photo: AFP
However, when two sold for more than US$1 million each at Bonhams, the market woke up.
“Before that first bottle was auctioned, nobody really knew how much it was worth,” said Aaron Chan, a Hong Kong-based collector who runs Club Qing whisky bar. “Suddenly people thought: ‘Oh my God, it’s worth so much,’ and owners realized it’s a good time to sell.”
The Bonhams sale in Edinburgh set a world record in pounds, but in US dollar terms, the most expensive was in Hong Kong in May, when a bottle of the 1926 Macallan with a label designed by Italian painter Valerio Adami sold for HK$8,636,250 (US$1,101,300). That worked out to about US$40,000 per shot.
Prices for whiskies have soared in recent years as investors and lovers of the beverage seek out rare single malts from Scotland, such as Dalmore and Port Ellen, as well as bottles from Japanese distilleries Karuizawa and Yamazaki.
As an alternative investment, the amber-colored spirit has appreciated 140 percent in the past five years, according to the Vintage 50 Index compiled by Rare Whisky 101, far outpacing the 19 percent advance of the Liv-ex 100 Benchmark Fine Wine Index.
Whisky has the advantage of a long shelf life, while top Bordeaux and Burgundies are generally best consumed with a few decades of bottling.
A wine’s vintage is determined by the year in which the grapes were picked and bottling usually takes place within 16 to 24 months of the harvest. For whisky, the age refers to the time spent in the cask. So the Macallan 1926 bottled in 1986 is 60 years old. That is a long time spent aging and because of loss due to evaporation, known as the “angel’s share,” only a small fraction of whisky was left in the cask to bottle.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the