A barrel from the Macallan distillery fetched a record price of the equivalent of 1.2 million francs at auction. Its original buyer “forgot” it at Macallan in 1988.
Macallan whiskeys are among the most expensive in the world.
It all started with an accident. In 1988, a whiskey lover bought a barrel from the famous Macallan distillery in Scotland for the equivalent of 6,000 francs. Soon after, he emigrated and left Great Britain – without his whiskey cask, which he forgot because of the stress of moving to Macallan. Decades later, when the distillery reminded him that the whiskey was still maturing, he remembered.
The barrel has now been auctioned – and achieved a record price: the 374-liter barrel changed hands for just over a million pounds, the equivalent of CHF 1.2 million. It clearly broke the previous sales record; In 2021, a Macallan sherry cask fetched £439,000. Over 2000 people attended the auction, the buyer is an individual from the USA.
Macallan whiskeys as luxury goods
“When the cask came up for auction with us, we knew immediately that it had the potential for a historic sale,” Daniel Milne, one of the founders of the sales platform Whiskey Hammer, told Bloomberg news agency. “Finding a cask of this age, quality and size is exceptional in itself. And then there’s the fact that it was distilled at Macallan’s.”
Macallan is one of the most sought-after distilleries in the world, and the whiskeys regularly achieve record prices. In 2019, a bottle of 60-year-old Macallan 1926 single malt fetched £1.5m at auction, compared to £1.2m a year earlier when a bottle from the same cask fetched £1.2m.
The prices rise sharply
Macallan products have a reputation for being exceptional investments. The price of whiskey has been rising sharply for years. According to the Knight Frank Rare Whiskey Index, rare whiskey prices have risen 428 percent over the past ten years. In 2021, the increase was 9 percent after there had been a slight fall in prices in 2020.
The buyers of whiskey casks are therefore speculating that their cask will also experience a high increase in value in a few years or decades. As casks are usually sold by distilleries immediately after bottling, a cask over thirty years old is a rare find. Whiskey is aged and valued by the time it has spent in casks.
According to wealth manager Schroders, cask whiskey aged for at least six years returns an average of 60 percent profit. However, there is a certain risk: the longer whiskey stays in a cask, the more it evaporates. In addition, barrels can break or leak, which means a total loss.
If you were to bottle the whiskey from the barrel sold today, that would result in a maximum of 534 bottles. A bottle would then cost the equivalent of 2100 francs. So there is still a lot of room for improvement.