Extremely Rare Bottles Of Whiskey Fetch Over $2 Million At Auction

Just six months after a Leonardo painting sold for $450 million, smashing all auction records, this week the world’s record excess liquidity once again underwent a “non-sterilized intervention”, when two bottles of whiskey sold for a mindboggling $2.11 million at a Hong Kong Bonhams auction on Friday, smashing the record for the most expensive bottles ever sold, according to the South China Morning Post.

After a rare 60-year-old Macallan whiskey named after British pop artist Peter Blake went for $1.01 million (HK$7.96 million) from a bidder over the phone, a second bottle from the same vintage named after Italian artist Valerio Adami sold for $1.1 million (HK$8.64 million) to a bidder in the room. Only twelve of each Macallan were ever made. 

The label for one of the bottles was designed by Blake, who is popularly known for co-creating the cover art for the album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles. –scmp

Both were distilled in 1926 and matured in a sherry hogshead cask until they were bottled in 1986.

They were expected to fetch between $450,000 and $575,000. The previous record at auction for a bottle of whiskey was set in 2014, when a six-liter Macallan went for $624,000. 

“These bottles are some of the oldest whiskies produced by Macallan in the 20th century,” said Daniel Lam On-tai, head of fine wine and whisky for Bonhams in Hong Kong. “They were not meant for sale. They were given to very important clients of Macallan.”

The bottles were presented in specially designed cabinets made out of brass and glass, according to Lam. 

Other highlights from the auction include the oldest Karuizawa whiskey known in existence at 52-years-old, setting a new record for a single bottle of Japanese whiskey at $312,000. It was one of 41 bottles produced in its batch, and was estimated to fetch between $190,000 and $230,000. 

All 645 items in the auction fetched a total of $5.9 million, or as the Fed would call it, an “non-sterilized intervention” in liquidity conditions.