The World’s Largest Bottle of Whisky Is 6 Feet Tall. It Just Sold for $1.4 Million.

[BNA/LION]

Thu, May 26, 2022
Robb Report

I guess if you must have it...Buy It!

We now know how much it costs to add the world’s largest whisky bottle to your collection.

The Intrepid, a 311-liter bottle of Macallan single-malt Scotch, sold for £1.1 million ($1.4 million at current exchange) during a live auction overseen by Edinburgh-based auction house Lyon & Turnbull on Wednesday, according to The Scotsman. The winning bid was placed by an anonymous collector, and there’s no denying that they’ve walked away with a giant pour.

The bottle holds Scotch from two sister casks that were aged for 32 years at Macallan’s Speyside distillery. In September of last year, the whisky was vatted and bottled by Duncan Taylor Scotch Whisky and soon after it was certified as the the world’s largest by Guinness World Records. The mammoth bottle is named the Intrepid in honor of 11 of the world’s most respected explorers—including Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Karen Darke MBE and Olly Hicks—and features all of their faces on its specially made label.

Lyon & Turnbull

Aside from the Intrepid’s seven-figure price tag, there are two figures that highlight how big the bottle is. The first is that it’s 311-liters of whisky is the equivalent of 444 normal-sized bottles of the spirit. The second is that the bottle stands 5 feet 11 inches tall. That’s two inches taller than the average American man.

“The Intrepid Collection, led by the world’s largest bottle of Scotch whisky, has attracted so much global interest,” Gavin Strang, the managing director of the auction house, told The Spirit Business. “It has been an incredibly exciting project to be involved in and we at Lyon & Turnbull are delighted the auction has been such a success.”

Amazingly, the bottle won’t go down as the world’s most expensive. In fact, it’s not even the most expensive bottle of Macallan. Those titles both belong to a bottle of 1926 60-Year-Old that sold for a still-stunning $1.53 million at an auction held by Christie’s in 2018.

If a 311-liter bottle of top-notch single-malt Scotch can’t top that, who knows what can.