Collector’s Cellar: The Macallan 1926 and the Making of a Market

T he Scotch whisky market as we understand it today is a relatively recent construct. The hierarchy of distillery names, the focus on age statements—12, 18, 25, 30 years—and the cultivation of distinct house styles are, in historical terms, only a few decades old. Until the 1980s, most whisky was produced for blending and sold to the trade, with only a small proportion retained for bottling as single malt and little emphasis on branding or collectibility.

From this landscape emerged a bottling that has come to define whisky at its most rarefied: the 1926 from The Macallan. Distilled in 1926 and bottled in 1986 as a 60-year-old, just 40 were drawn from the cask after the angels had taken their share. It has since become the benchmark for the trophy whisky, setting successive auction records—most recently at Sotheby’s London in 2023, where a bottle realized £2.18 million, becoming the most expensive bottle of wine or spirit ever sold at auction.

Though the distillery, founded in 1824 on an estate above the River Spey in the Scottish Highlands, has since played an active role in shaping the modern collecting landscape, the origins of the 1926 lie with a woman sustaining a family business in difficult circumstances. Following the sudden death of Janet “Nettie” Harbinson’s husband in 1918, it was assumed that the business would be sold. But Nettie, granddaughter of Alexander Reid, founder of The Macallan, took it on, becoming managing director and overseeing the expansion of the distillery’s warehousing through the 1920s and early 1930s.

It was under her control that the sherry-seasoned oak cask number 263 was laid down but, as Cheryl Traversa, who oversees the distillery’s archives, explains: “It was a regular cask to us and we didn’t deal with it any differently when it was distilled.” For decades, it remained simply one cask among many, though remarkable in its increasing age.

Nettie’s tenure saw other innovations too. Through surviving correspondence, Traversa has traced orders placed well beyond Britain—from Cyprus and California to South America and Jamaica—alongside early advertising initiatives, including Macallan promotions on the backs of London bus tickets in 1930. Even as the cask slumbered, the business around it evolved.

By the 1980s, however, conditions had shifted. The whisky industry had endured a period of contraction, the so-called “whisky loch,” leaving unusually deep reserves of aging stock. The Macallan had already begun to test the upper limits of maturation, releasing a 50-year-old in 1983 in a run of 500 bottles priced at around £500—a bold move in its own right.

What followed in 1986 under Allan Shiach, Nettie’s great-nephew and then chairman of The Macallan, was a far more decisive escalation. Only 12 bottles of the 1926 were released initially, priced at £5,000, or roughly 10 times higher than the 1983 offering, for a fraction of the volume. As Jonny Fowle, Sotheby’s global head of whisky, notes, “it was enormously ambitious—the first time whisky was ever positioned at that kind of level.”

The release did not rely on age alone. Eye-catching labels were commissioned from artists, transforming the bottles into distinct objects while also responding to the geography of the market. The first, by British pop artist Peter Blake, played to the home market with a collage design imagining a 1920s Highland scene with Shiach in the foreground. Later, Italian artist Valerio Adami, a leading talent in another important market, reimagined Nettie as a linear figure—the label that would later appear on the record-breaking £2.18 million bottle. Finally, in 1999, a single hand-painted example by Irish muralist Michael Dillon, commissioned by Fortnum & Mason, brought a different order of rarity. In each case, the bottle became inseparable from its artistic treatment, establishing a model—today much imitated—in which whisky could operate simultaneously as liquid, object and image.

In the decades since, whisky has become a global collectible asset. The center of gravity has shifted from Europe to Asia—where markets such as Taiwan became particular strongholds—and, more recently, toward the U.S. “When I joined Sotheby’s in 2019, we sold more than 80% to Asian buyers. Now it’s less than 50%,” Fowle notes. Throughout these shifts, the 1926 has remained the benchmark, its value driven as much by its rarity as by its place in the story of the category itself.

This brings us to February 2026, when I stood in a cool, stone-built dunnage warehouse on The Macallan estate, dating from 1887. It was a century to the day since Nettie laid down the original cask. “You get a real sense of what it would have been like to roll that cask through the door,” said Euan Kennedy, lead whisky maker at The Macallan, to the small group assembled to witness—and taste—the moment. Nearby, a new release drawn from a cask filled in 1986 was being bottled.

The Romantica Collection marks the 40th anniversary of the 1926 bottling. Drawn from a single sherry-seasoned cask filled in 1986 and bottled at 48.6% ABV, the whisky reflects four decades of maturation, combining sherried richness with a tropical fruit character and a faint whisper of peat smoke, a vestige of earlier production methods.

As with the 1926, art plays a central role. Jaume Ferras, the distillery’s global creative director, returned to the three original artists to create new interpretations of their respective work, each issued in editions of 86. The structure of the release—limited, serialized and artist-led—echoes the logic that made the earlier bottling so influential. Kennedy is careful, however, not to cast the new whisky as a recreation of the famed forebear. “It’s almost foolish to try and replicate that,” he says. Instead, it is intended to honor the 1926 while establishing a continuity with it.

The artists responded to the distillery’s history in different ways: Dillon reimagines his pastoral scene to include the sweeping roofline of the new distillery building, completed in 2018 by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners; Adami further abstracts his image of Nettie and adds a mise en abyme repeat; and Blake assembles a cast of contemporary figures before Easter Elchies House—the 18th-century manor at the center of the estate. The effect is to place the past and present in direct conversation.

Yet for all this elaboration, the release remains defined by what is in the cask. “There was only really one that could tell the story,” Kennedy says of the cask selected, number 9925. Eighty-six sets of three bottles draw heavily on it, leaving only a small remainder. When I put this to Kennedy, he acknowledges the implication. “If it lasts the distance… it’d be quite remarkable to be able to tell that story in another 20 years’ time.”

The calculation, he suggests, was never allowed to drive the whisky itself. The cask selection came first: what was available, what it could sustain, and what quality it demanded. Only then was the shape of the release determined around it. “We don’t let the project or the ambition lead the whisky,” he says. What remains, held back in cask, is deliberately so. “We’ll keep that up our sleeve for the potential continuation of the story,” says Kennedy. “We’ll see what happens.”