Macallan 1926: forty bottles from one cask and the whisky auction record

Last updated: 9 November 2026

Key facts

• The Macallan 1926 comes from cask 263, a European oak hogshead filled on 25 February 1926 and bottled in 1986 after sixty years.

• Cask 263 yielded 40 bottles of the Macallan 1926: 12 with a label by Peter Blake (1986), 12 with a label by Valerio Adami (1993), up to 14 Fine & Rare (2002) and 2 without a label.

• The first 12 bottles of the Macallan 1926 cost £5,000 each in 1986, and in 1987 a bottle sold in New York for £5,000, which set the Guinness record for the world's most expensive spirit.

• The highest auction price in sterling for a bottle of whisky is £2,187,500, paid for a Macallan 1926 with the Adami label at Sotheby's London on 18 November 2023.

• The highest auction price in dollars is $2,807,975 (£2,125,000), paid for a Macallan 1926 Fine & Rare at Sotheby's at The Macallan Estate on 9 October 2026.

• The same Macallan 1926 Fine & Rare, with the bottle code "eh742b" verified by The Macallan, sold at Sotheby's in October 2019 for £1,452,000 and in October 2026 for £2,125,000.

• We documented eleven public auction sales of the Macallan 1926 between May 2018 and October 2026, with buyer's prices from £615,063 to £2,187,500.

• Nine of the ten highest auction prices in dollars for a standard-size bottle of whisky were paid for a Macallan 1926 (as of 9 November 2026).

• Since May 2018, four auction houses have sold a Macallan 1926 for more than a million dollars, in Hong Kong, Edinburgh, London, Speyside and online.

What is the Macallan 1926?

The Macallan 1926 is a Scotch single malt whisky distilled at The Macallan in Speyside in 1926, matured for sixty years in cask 263 and bottled in 1986 as a 60 Years Old. The cask yielded forty bottles, released in four versions. At the time it was the oldest whisky The Macallan had ever bottled. It is the most expensive whisky ever sold at auction.

Cask 263 was filled on 25 February 1926, as recorded in the stock book in The Macallan's archive. It was a sherry-seasoned hogshead of European oak, probably Spanish, brought from Jerez. The distillery was then run by Janet "Nettie" Harbinson. She took charge after her husband's sudden death in 1918, when it was assumed the business would be sold. Cask 263 was filled and laid down under her leadership.

The 1929 crash, the end of American Prohibition and the Second World War all fell within the next sixty years. The cask reportedly spent most of that time in Warehouse 7, and its strength was still above 40% after almost sixty years. Willie Phillips and marketing director Hugh Mitcalfe are said to have come across the cask in the early 1980s while looking for a 50-year-old whisky, after which a selection committee approved it. In 1986 the chairman, Allan Shiach, Harbinson's great-nephew, had the cask bottled.

The Macallan did not sell the bottles through the trade; some were reportedly offered to its top clients. The first twelve bottles were released in 1986 at £5,000 each, around ten times the price of The Macallan's 1983 50-year-old. Buyers received their bottle directly from the distillery. One owner of a Blake bottle wrote for Sotheby's in 2018 that buyers had to apply, and that one bottle was released per continent. Jonny Fowle, Sotheby's Global Head of Whisky & Spirits, calls the launch "enormously ambitious", because whisky had never before been offered at that price.

On 22 July 1987 Premiere Wine Merchants in New York paid £5,000 for one bottle. The Guinness Book of Records certificate, signed by Norris McWhirter, recognises it as "The World's Most Expensive Spirit". No auction is known for this sale.

Timeline of the Macallan 1926

The Macallan 1926 was distilled in 1926, bottled in 1986 and has changed hands at several auction houses since 1987. The timeline below sets out the key moments in order, from the filling of cask 263 to the auction on The Macallan Estate in October 2026. Images: Sotheby's.

How many bottles of the Macallan 1926 exist, and which labels do they carry?

Forty bottles of the Macallan 1926 were filled, all in 1986 and all from cask 263. They came in four versions: twelve with a label by Peter Blake (1986), twelve with a label by Valerio Adami (1993), up to fourteen with the Fine & Rare label (2002) and two without a label. The Macallan has never published how many survive. At least one bottle is known to have been drunk.

Blake's label was aimed at the home market in Britain. Adami designed his for another important market, drawing Nettie Harbinson as a linear figure. Fine & Rare appeared in 2002 as the first release in The Macallan's range of old vintages under that name.

The versions also differ in strength and bottle size. The Blake and Adami labels state 42.8%, the Fine & Rare label 42.6%. The Blake and Adami bottles hold 75cl, the Fine & Rare bottles 70cl. No explanation for these differences is known, even though every bottle was filled from the same cask in 1986.

The Irish muralist Michael Dillon painted one of the two unlabelled bottles in 1999, commissioned by Fortnum & Mason, which offered it for sale in London. He painted Easter Elchies House, the manor house on The Macallan's estate, with the Highlands, a stag and birds. The bottle has been auctioned once, at Christie's London on 29 November 2018.

In 2025 the Vietnamese collector Nguyễn Đình Tuấn Việt, who owns five 1926 bottles, had a Fine & Rare bottle painted by the Italian artist Roberto Ferri, with two nymphs representing barley and oak. This bottle, the Masterpiece Edition, has thereby become a separate artwork, which leaves at most thirteen bottles with a Fine & Rare label. The owner reportedly turned down an offer of $10 million. No involvement by The Macallan has been reported.

As far as is known, at least one bottle has been opened and drunk, as photographs taken in Japan show. One bottle with the Adami label is thought to have been destroyed in the 2011 earthquake in Japan, though this has never been confirmed. The whereabouts of the second unlabelled bottle are unknown. McTear's in Glasgow sold an unlabelled bottle in 2001 and again in 2002; whether that was the second unlabelled bottle, or a bottle that later received a Fine & Rare label, is not known.

What has the Macallan 1926 sold for at auction?

The earliest documented auction of a Macallan 1926 was in 1991, when a Blake bottle reached a hammer price of £6,375 in Glasgow. The highest sum in sterling is £2,187,500, for an Adami bottle at Sotheby's London in 2023. We documented eleven public auction sales of the Macallan 1926 between May 2018 and October 2026, with buyer's prices from £615,063 to £2,187,500. The most recent took place on 9 October 2026.

On 9 October 2026, Sotheby's held its first auction on The Macallan's estate in Speyside, a century after the 1926 distillation. Fifty invited collectors were in the room, while others bid by phone and online. Lot 19 of the 42 was a single 70cl bottle: The Macallan Fine & Rare 60 Years Old 1926, in its original wooden case. The hammer fell at the low estimate of £1.7 million (estimate £1.7 to 2.2 million). Including the buyer's premium, the buyer paid £2,125,000. The buyer has not been named.

It was the same bottle Sotheby's sold in London on 24 October 2019 for £1,452,000. Before the sale, The Macallan verified the unique bottle code "eh742b", the same code as lot 160 in 2019. It is the only bottle from cask 263 whose two auction sales we can link with certainty.

Notes to the table. The buyer's price is the hammer price plus the buyer's premium and, where it applies, the overhead premium and VAT. Dollar figures are at the exchange rate on the day of the sale. "Unknown" and "not found" mean we found the figure in no source.

Based on the provenance and bottle codes the auction houses give, the eleven public auction sales since May 2018 involved nine or ten different bottles. One bottle has certainly been sold twice: the Fine & Rare with bottle code "eh742b", in 2019 and in 2026.

Until 2018 prices stayed below £50,000. The Christie's New York sale in December 2007 was the city's first spirits auction since Prohibition.

In 2018 the price level changed. On 18 May, at Bonhams in Hong Kong, bottles from cask 263 passed a million dollars at auction for the first time. The Adami bottle Bonhams sold in Edinburgh on 3 October came from an owner who had bought it directly from the distillery. On 29 November the bottle painted by Michael Dillon fetched £1,200,000 at Christie's London, the first bottle of whisky to make more than a million pounds.

In October 2019 the Fine & Rare with bottle code "eh742b" fetched £1,452,000 at Sotheby's London, at the time the record for a bottle of wine or spirits. In 2020 and 2021 Whisky Auctioneer sold two bottles from the estate of the collector Richard Gooding; the second was the first bottle of whisky to reach a hammer price of a million pounds in an online-only auction.

The Adami bottle Sotheby's sold on 18 November 2023 came from the collection of the Taiwanese collector Pierre Chen, and was the first 1926 bottle The Macallan itself reconditioned before a sale. As far as is known, no bottle from the cask came to auction again until October 2026.

Bottles with the same label have fetched very different sums. One Adami bottle sold for £848,750 at Bonhams Edinburgh in October 2018, another for £2,187,500 at Sotheby's London in November 2023. The label alone does not explain the price.

Is the Macallan 1926 the most expensive whisky in the world?

The Macallan 1926 is the most expensive whisky ever sold at auction. In sterling the record belongs to an Adami bottle at £2,187,500 (Sotheby's, 18 November 2023); in dollars it belongs to the Fine & Rare of 9 October 2026 at $2,807,975. Nine of the ten highest auction prices in dollars for a standard-size bottle of whisky were paid for a Macallan 1926.

There are two record holders because of the exchange rate. The 2026 bottle made £62,500 less than the 2023 bottle, and its hammer price was lower too: £1.7 million against £1.75 million. But sterling was stronger in 2026. The conversion used around 1.24 dollars to the pound in 2023 and around 1.32 in 2026. As a result £2,125,000 comes to $2,807,975, which is $93,725 more than the $2,714,250 of 2023. Even at the rate Guinness World Records uses for 2023, the 2026 bottle is $73,721 higher in dollars. As of 9 November 2026, Guinness World Records lists the 2023 bottle as the record holder, based on the sterling price.

Between 2018 and 2023, each of the four versions (Fine & Rare, Peter Blake, Valerio Adami and Michael Dillon) broke the auction record.

The Yamazaki 50 Years Old in ninth place set the record for Japanese whisky at Bonhams in Hong Kong.

Some lists of the world's most expensive whiskies also include sales that cannot be compared with a single standard-size bottle at a public auction:

• The Emerald Isle from the Craft Irish Whiskey Co., a set of a decanter, a Fabergé egg, a watch and cigars, went to the collector Mike Daley for $2.8 million in January 2024. That was an announced private sale.

• The Intrepid, Macallan 32 Years Old in a single 311-litre bottle, fetched $1.375 million at Lyon & Turnbull on 25 May 2022. It was one bottle at a public auction, but held the equivalent of about 444 standard bottles.

• The Macallan Red Collection, a set of six bottles aged 40 to 78 years, fetched £756,400 at Sotheby's London on 31 October 2020.

• The Macallan in Lalique Six Pillars, a set of six decanters, fetched $993,000 at Sotheby's Hong Kong on 2 April 2017. A complete set sold for £350,000 at The Macallan Estate on 9 October 2026.

• Dalmore Decades No. 6, a set of six vintages, fetched around £830,000 at Sotheby's Hong Kong in October 2021.

Isabella's Islay tops many lists at $6.2 million. There is no record of any sale; the figure is an asking price for a jewel-encrusted decanter.

How does the Macallan 1926 compare with other old Macallans?

Among The Macallan's old releases, the Macallan 1926 has the oldest vintage, and at forty bottles a far smaller edition than The Reach (288 decanters) and the 72 Years Old in Lalique (600 decanters). The Macallan has released older whisky by age: The Reach, from 2022, is 81 years old, and the 2020 Red Collection included a 78-year-old.

Both the Macallan 1926 and a bottle of The Reach were sold at the auction on 9 October 2026. The Reach 81 Years Old fetched £131,250, around 6% of the £2,125,000 paid for the Macallan 1926.

Why is the Macallan 1926 so expensive?

The price of the Macallan 1926 rests on three facts. Nobody can make another whisky from 1926 that spent sixty years in a single cask. There have never been more than forty bottles, and that number can only fall. And every bottle comes from one cask, and for some of them the sales history is publicly documented: the earliest known sale dates from 1987, the earliest documented auction from 1991.

Time is the part that cannot be reproduced. The cask was filled in 1926 and emptied in 1986, and in every year between, part of its contents evaporated. A cask filled today can produce a sixty-year-old whisky in 2086 at the earliest, and never a 1926 vintage.

How is a Macallan 1926 authenticated?

A Macallan 1926 is authenticated through its documented provenance, verification by The Macallan of the bottle code, appearance and format, sometimes a certificate of authenticity from The Macallan and, in one publicly described case in 2023, a comparison of a 1ml sample with another bottle from 1926. No fake Macallan 1926 has been confirmed, though fake older Macallans have.

That case concerned the Adami bottle Sotheby's sold in November 2023. The Macallan replaced the cork and the capsule, with a new capsule made in Austria to match a swatch of the original, and re-glued the label corners. The sample was tested against another 1926 bottle at Edrington's offices in Glasgow, and Kirsteen Campbell, The Macallan's master whisky maker, approved the bottle's condition. That bottle has since served as the reference for all other 1926 bottles that may be tested in future. As far as is known, the October 2026 bottle did not undergo this process, though The Macallan did verify the unique bottle code, other features of the bottle's appearance and the 700ml format. The bottle painted by Michael Dillon was auctioned at Christie's in 2018 in a wooden The Macallan 60 Year Old presentation case, with a certificate of authenticity from The Macallan.

In 2017, at the Waldhaus am See hotel in St. Moritz, the Chinese writer Zhang Wei paid CHF 9,999 for a single glass of a supposed Macallan from 1878. Tests commissioned by Rare Whisky 101 showed it was a blend made between 1970 and 1972. The hotel refunded the buyer.

In the early 2000s The Macallan itself bought around a hundred bottles that were supposed to date from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Radiocarbon tests showed that the bottles tested, labelled with years from 1856 to 1919, held whisky made after 1950, and The Macallan later removed such bottles from display at its new distillery. Radiocarbon dating can only tell whether whisky dates from before or after the 1950s; it cannot pin down a 1926 vintage.

Empty Macallan 1926 presentation cases are sold separately at auction, so the packaging alone says nothing about what is in the bottle.

What does the Macallan 1926 taste like?

Few people have tasted the Macallan 1926. The official tasting notes, published for the sale of 9 October 2026, describe a nose of dark dried fruit, raisins, dates and prunes with cloves and treacle toffee, and a palate of robust, resinous wood with treacle toffee and dried fruit. Kirsteen Campbell of The Macallan and Jonny Fowle of Sotheby's described it in 2023 in the same terms of dark fruit and wood.

• Colour: "Laburnum".

• Nose: "Rich dark dried fruits, raisins, dates and prunes with wonderfully woody spices (cloves) and treacle toffee".

• Palate: "Robust resinous wood, sweetened with medium treacle toffee and rich dried fruit".

• Finish: "Drying wood with dark dried fruit and treacle toffee".

Campbell described it in November 2023 as "rich dark fruits, black cherry compote alongside sticky dates, followed by intense sweet antique oak." She also mentioned dark chocolate, treacle and ginger, and said "the notes go on and on".

Fowle said in November 2023 that he had tasted "a tiny drop, a tiny drop". He called it very rich, with a lot of dried fruit, spice and wood, and added: "It's not a whisky to take lightly. It's a rich, rich dram, but it is incredible." He linked the deep colour to sixty years in dark European oak. The auction catalogues of 2019 and 2023 did not yet include a tasting note.

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Who buys the Macallan 1926?

The Macallan 1926 is bought by collectors on several continents. Where buyers' origins have been reported, they were a private Asian collector at Bonhams Edinburgh in 2018, a European buyer at Whisky Auctioneer in 2020 and an international businessman at Le Clos in Dubai in 2018. Names are rarely given: the buyers in November 2023 and October 2026 were not disclosed. The 2023 bottle came from the collection of the Taiwanese collector Pierre Chen.

Sotheby's sold $21.5 million of spirits in 2025. The Macallan was the largest brand in that department in 2025 for the fifth year running, with 18% of sales. Sotheby's sold seven of the ten most expensive spirits lots worldwide that year. At the end of 2024 an average bottle there fetched around £15,000.

Macallan also carries the most weight in the Whiskystats Scotland index, which tracks the 500 most-traded Scotch whiskies at auction, weighted by market value. In October 2026, 71 of those 500 bottles were a Macallan, together accounting for 34.5% of the index weight. Port Ellen follows at 9.7% and Brora at 8.8%. The Macallan 1926 itself is not in the index.

The buyers are changing. When Fowle joined Sotheby's in 2019, it sold more than 80% to buyers in Asia, he says; by May 2026 it was less than half. In 2025, 40% of Sotheby's spirits buyers came from Asia, 39% from the Americas and 21% from Europe. The United States was the country with the most buyers, at 38%, and 31% of spirits buyers were new to Sotheby's.

At the end of 2024, Fowle put the typical buyer at between thirty and their late forties, around fifteen years younger than before.

What does the price of the Macallan 1926 say about investing in whisky?

The price of the Macallan 1926 shows that rare Scotch whisky trades on a large, mature and international auction market, with specialist auction houses, buyers on three continents and prices that can be traced over decades. The price of one bottle says nothing about how the value of an average bottle or cask has moved. On this market too, prices fall, costs are high and liquidity is limited.

Between May 2018 and October 2026 we documented eleven public auction sales of the Macallan 1926, at four auction houses (Bonhams, Christie's, Sotheby's and Whisky Auctioneer) and in Hong Kong, Edinburgh, London, New York, Speyside and online. The same Fine & Rare, with bottle code "eh742b", sold in 2019 and again in 2026. The cask's price history can be followed from the first known sale, in New York in 1987, to the auction on the estate in 2026.

Trading in the Macallan 1926 is part of a much larger auction market. Sotheby's sold $21.5 million of spirits in 2025. The auction houses Whiskystats tracks sold around 169,000 bottles in the first half of 2026, for roughly €51 million. Whiskystats also keeps a price index of the 500 most-traded Scotch whiskies. At the sale on 9 October 2026, all 42 lots sold, for a total of £3.3 million against an estimate of £2.4 to 3.2 million. It was the second most valuable whisky auction Sotheby's has held.

Buyers come from Asia, the Americas and Europe, and in 2025, 31% of Sotheby's spirits buyers were buying there for the first time. Alongside the general auction houses there are houses that specialise in whisky, such as Whisky Auctioneer. For the Macallan 1926, the distillery itself takes part in authentication. The Macallan verified the bottle code of the 2026 bottle and reconditioned the 2023 Adami bottle before its sale. In this segment, provenance weighs heavily in the price; a bottle without documented provenance is hard to sell (see the section on authentication above).

Three limitations stand against this.

• Price movement. In Knight Frank's Luxury Investment Index (The Wealth Report 2026, data to the fourth quarter of 2025), whisky fell by 10.9%. Over the ten years to the end of 2025, whisky is up 111.9% in the same index; in the 2024 report, the ten-year figure was 280%. At the October 2026 sale, a bottle of The Reach 81 Years Old fetched £131,250 (estimate £90,000 to 140,000), around 56% less than the £300,000 Sotheby's achieved for a bottle in 2022. Those 2022 proceeds went to an apprenticeship fund set up by The Macallan, which makes the comparison less clean.

• Liquidity. A sale depends on the auction calendar and on who is bidding at the time. In the online auctions of Whisky.Auction, a platform for the broad market, 1.7% of bottles failed to meet their reserve in 2021, 3.5% in 2022 and just over 5% in 2023.

• Costs. At Sotheby's, wine and spirits buyers pay a 24% buyer's premium and a 1% overhead premium on top of the hammer price, excluding any VAT. That is how £1.7 million became £2,125,000 for the buyer. Across the sales in the table, the buyer's premium ranged from 10% at Whisky Auctioneer in 2020 to 25% at Sotheby's in 2023 and 2026.

For how the wider auction market moved in October, see our whisky monthly update for October 2026.

Forty bottles from one cask

The Macallan 1926 comes from a single cask, filled on 25 February 1926. Sixty years passed between filling and bottling, and another forty since the bottling in 1986. Of the forty bottles, at least one has been drunk, one may have been lost in the 2011 earthquake in Japan, and one unlabelled bottle is unaccounted for. Since 2025, one Fine & Rare has carried a painting by Roberto Ferri instead of a label. The Macallan has never published a count of the bottles that remain. The most recent known sale took place on 9 October 2026, on the estate where the cask was filled a century earlier.

About Scotch Whisky Investments

Scotch Whisky Investments has specialised in investing in Scotch single malt whisky since 2002. We are the world's largest whisky asset manager, with €327 million in assets under management. We have held an AFM licence since 16 October 2014, which makes us the first and still the only company in the Netherlands with an AFM-licensed investment product in Scotch single malt whisky.

We focus on the exclusive, rare segment of the market, where scarcity determines value. That means whisky from closed distilleries, old vintages, and bottles and casks with documented provenance. The Macallan 1926 is ultra-rare and sits at the very top of that market; we do not offer bottles of this kind.

More than 1,600 investors build a portfolio of physical bottles and casks through us. Broadly, a portfolio holds 20% exclusive, rare bottles and 80% maturing casks. The investor retains legal ownership. We handle the specialist work, from selection and provenance verification to storage. Our investors' bottles and casks are stored in Scotland under bond. Want to know more about what a whisky portfolio could look like for you? Feel free to arrange a no-obligation introductory meeting.

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