Macallan miniature expected to fetch £1,000

A miniature bottle of 32-year-old Macallan that was distilled in 1937 is expected to fetch £1,000 at a rare whisky auction in Glasgow later this week.

This Macallan miniature, distilled in 1937, is expected to sell for £1,000

The Macallan dram, which was distilled in 1937 and bottled in 1969, has been given an estimate of £800-£1,000 and will go under the hammer at McTears auction house in Glasgow this Friday 6 July.

“The Macallan 1937 Fine & Rare, which was rebottled in 2002, has never come to auction before so we believe it will attract a lot of interest.

“The Fine & Rare series consists of bottles and miniatures of some of the oldest and rarest Macallan whiskies, with vintages ranging from 1926 up to 1991,” said McTear’s whisky expert, Graeme Maxwell.

“The miniature is one of the earliest available and proves that good things come in small packages,” he added.

All of the big name distilleries will be represented at the auction with bottles from The Macallan, The Dalmore, Talisker, Highland Park and Bowmore going under the hammer.

Among the highlights of the sale are Springbank Door Gods – three single cask bottlings from the Campbeltown distillery – that are estimated to fetch between £1,500 and £2,500.

Also going under the hammer are Bowmore Bicentenary, which has an estimate of £2,000 to £3,000, and a Macallan 30 years old, which could fetch up to £4,000.

The rare whisky auction market in the UK is booming and has smashed the £25 million mark as value sales grew by a staggering 76% last year.

Some 83,713 bottles of whisky were sold at auction in Britain last year, achieving an average bottle price of £299, though the top lots sold for much more.

In January, a bottle of Yamazaki 50-year-old single malt set a new record for Japanese whisky sold at auction when it went under the hammer at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong for a tidy £209,740 – double its estimate.

Rare Whisky 101’s Apex 1000 Index, which tracks the best-performing 1,000 bottles of rare whisky, outperformed both the oil and gold indexes, and also the Liv-ex Fine Wine 100 last year, closing the year up by 27.5%.

Last December alone saw 8,848 bottles of Scotch sold at auction in the UK – nearly half the number of bottles sold throughout 2013.