A few of Scotland’s most high-profile whisky manufacturers confronted contrasting fates throughout a brace of latest auctions.
Bottles of The Dalmore and Bowmore fell wanting their pre-sale estimates, whereas lots that includes The Balvenie didn’t discover a purchaser.
‘The Uncommon’, the third bottle in The Dalmore’s ‘Luminary’ sequence, fetched HK$400,000 (£38,690) throughout Sotheby’s spirits public sale in Hong Kong, falling wanting its pre-sale estimate of between HK$800,000 and HK$1,600,000.
The decanter holding the 52-year-old single malt was housed in a sculpture created by Ben Dobbin, a designer at structure agency Foster + Companions.
Solely two sculptures have been made to accompany this 12 months’s version within the Luminary sequence, with the second as a result of go on show at The Dalmore’s distillery close to Alness, within the Highlands.
The whisky was matured in American white oak ex-bourbon barrels, earlier than being completed in a posh set of casks: classic 1980 Calvados; 1940 Colheita Port; Tawny Port; 40-year-old Pedro Ximénez Sherry; and Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
Proceeds from the sale of the bottle have been donated to the Victoria & Albert (V&A) Museum in Dundee, which opened in 2018 and has acquired assist from The Dalmore by way of a partnership that started in 2020, together with donations of greater than £200,000.
Kieran Healey-Ryder, world head of communications at Whyte & Mackay, the distiller that owns The Dalmore, instructed Decanter: ‘The great thing about this partnership has been that we’ve labored with Sotheby’s for 5 years alongside V&A Dundee.
‘We’ve had conversations with architects in regards to the stability between the aptitude and type, the fashion and construction, of our whisky.
‘Every of the architects who we’ve labored with over these three editions has led on the creation of the whisky, from the mixing by way of to the flavour notes.’
A bottle of 54-year-old Bowmore additionally failed to succeed in its pre-sale valuation of between £140,000 and £220,000, altering arms at Sotheby’s on-line whisky public sale for £112,500.
The ‘Bowmore ARC-54: Iridos Version’ included a decanter designed by Aston Martin, a part of a long-running partnership between the Islay distillery and the luxurious automotive marque.
The whisky was blended from a 1967 European oak butt, a 1968 Sherry butt, and a 1968 American oak hogshead.
The proceeds from the sale of ARC-54 Iridos’s predecessor, ARC-52 Mokume, which fetched £187,500 in 2023, have been donated to communities on Islay, whereas cash from the newest sale will fund initiatives in communities surrounding proprietor Suntory’s different Scottish distilleries: Ardmore, Auchentoshan and Glen Garioch.
Nonetheless, the identical public sale didn’t discover a purchaser for ‘The Balvenie 50-12 months-Previous Non-public Cask #16560 Trunk’, a group of 10 bottles of the Speyside distillery’s single malt displayed in a suitcase, which carried a pre-sale estimate of between £240,000 and £450,000.
Sotheby’s mentioned the public sale marked the primary look by any bottles from The Balvenie’s uncommon cask programme.
Every of the 220 bottles stuffed from the uncommon cask – housed in 22 wood chests – is owned by a single collector, who donated the lot to boost cash for the World Vast Fund for Nature (WWF) and The King’s Belief, previously The Prince’s Belief, a charity based in 1976 to ‘enhance the lives of deprived younger individuals within the UK’.
