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A rare bottle of whisky has become the second most valuable ever sold at auction, after it went for £2.1 million. When measured in US dollars, the bottle of The Macallan 1926 is the most valuable ever sold. The “fabled” tipple went under the hammer at the Macallan estate in Craigellachie, Moray, in an invitation-only auction staged by Sotheby’s. Distilled in 1926 and bottled aged 60 in 1986, it sold on Friday for a total of £2,187,500 (2,714,250 US dollars). It was one of a number of Macallan whiskies – most from private collections – being sold to mark the centenary year of the vintage. Jonny Fowle, global head of whisky & spirits at Sotheby’s, described the event, which is the first ever staged at the distillery, as a “remarkable milestone”. “Today’s result reflects the enduring fascination that The Macallan 1926 inspires among collectors around the world,” he said. “More than a century after it was distilled, it continues to stand alone as the benchmark for rarity, provenance and desirability in whisky. “Achieving the second-highest price ever paid for a bottle of whisky at auction, and setting a new record for a Fine & Rare bottling, at the first auction held at The Macallan Estate during the centenary year of the vintage itself, is a remarkable milestone in the history of whisky collecting.” After maturing for six decades, just 40 bottles of The Macallan 1926 were drawn from a single sherry seasoned oak cask – cask number 263 – in 1986, representing the oldest vintage ever bottled by The Macallan. Fourteen were decorated with the Fine and Rare label, while 12 were designed by British artist Sir Peter Blake, and a further 12 by Italian artist Valerio Adami. Two bottles were left unlabelled, with one later being hand-painted by Irish artist Michael Dillon, before going on to become the first bottle of whisky to surpass £1 million when sold in 2018. Jaume Ferras, creative director at The Macallan, said the estate was “humbled” by the response to the auction. “It was a privilege to welcome Sotheby’s and guests to our home, and to see such appreciation for whiskies that represent different chapters in our history,” he said. “We are especially proud that the sale of The Macallan Romantica Collection Artists’ Edition, which has raised funds for charities nominated by the artists Valerio Adami, Sir Peter Blake and Michael Dillon, (give) this remarkable collaboration a meaningful legacy beyond the auction itself.” The highest price ever paid for a bottle of whisky is £2.2 million (2.8 million dollars), which American collector Mike Daley paid for a bottle of The Emerald Isle by the Craft Irish Whiskey Co in 2024. Follow STV News on WhatsApp Scan the QR code on your mobile device for all the latest news from around the country

Every grain of barley destined for a glass of Scotch whisky begins its life in soil, and for decades that soil has been fed almost entirely by synthetic fertiliser. The nitrogen that drives cereal yields comes from the Haber–Bosch process, an industrial feat that consumes an estimated one to three percent of global energy and generates a comparable share of greenhouse gas emissions. Once applied, nitrogenous fertiliser can also decompose into nitrous oxide, a gas responsible for roughly four to five percent of total global greenhouse emissions, while excess nitrogen and phosphorus wash into waterways and drive eutrophication. Against this backdrop, a team of researchers at the James Hutton Institute, the University of Dundee and Chivas Brothers – Pernod Ricard has tested a radically different idea: feeding barley with dried microalgae. Their findings, published in the journal Plant and Soil, suggest that a green powder made from the single-celled alga Chlorella vulgaris can match conventional mineral fertiliser in ways few would have predicted. The study is the first to evaluate microalgal fertiliser on malting barley at field scale, and the first to ask whether algae-grown grain still makes acceptable malt. Barley is the fourth most cultivated cereal in the world, and in the United Kingdom it is second only to wheat in production, contributing £1.16 billion to the economy. Roughly a quarter of UK barley goes to brewing and distilling, a premium market that adds £5.5 billion through Scotch Whisky alone. Crucially, distilleries and breweries produce enormous volumes of nutrient-rich wastewater that must be treated by law before release. Species of Chlorella have already been shown to thrive on such waste, stripping out nitrogen and phosphorus with removal efficiencies above 90 and 80 percent respectively in most studies. The researchers envision a circular economy in which algae clean distillery wastewater, accumulate the nutrients, and are then returned to the fields as fertiliser, closing the barley-to-malt-to-whisky loop. To test the concept rigorously, the team ran three glasshouse trials and one field trial using spring barley cv. Laureate, currently the dominant malting variety in Scotland. In the glasshouse, they compared four treatments: an unfertilised negative control, dried Chlorella vulgaris powder alone, the same powder supplemented with potassium, calcium and other nutrients that the algae supplied in lower amounts, and a mineral salt positive control modelled on Hoagland solution ratios. Nitrogen was normalised across the fertilised treatments so that total available nitrogen reached 118 kilograms per hectare, the recommended rate for malting barley set by the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board. The trials used three different soils from fields near Dundee, each with distinct pH and carbon-to-nitrogen ratios, to ensure the findings were robust to soil-to-soil variation rather than artefacts of a single growing medium. The results were striking in their consistency. Across all three glasshouse experiments, plants grown with microalgal fertiliser showed no statistically significant difference from mineral-fertilised plants in any measured trait: not in earless dry biomass, tiller number, filled grain count, thousand grain weight, or grain dimensions. All three fertilised treatments significantly outperformed the unfertilised control, with earless dry biomass increasing by 18 to 28 percent, tillers by 11 to 28 percent, and total filled grain by 13 to 21 percent. The only transient differences appeared in the speed of early development, where algae-fed plants briefly tillered or elongated faster than some counterparts, but these gaps vanished by later growth stages and had no bearing on final yield. The team used linear mixed models treating experiment and block as random effects, and found no significant treatment-by-experiment interactions, meaning the fertiliser source behaved the same way regardless of soil or season. Concerns that algae might release nitrogen too slowly and starve young plants, a worry raised in earlier literature, were not borne out. During early tillering, there were no significant differences in leaf length, leaf area, aboveground biomass or the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index, a spectral measure of leaf greenness and photosynthetic capacity, between any of the treatments. This aligns with prior work showing that phosphorus from algal biomass is readily accessible to wheat for up to six weeks after sowing. The slow-release character of algal nitrogen and phosphorus, with plant-available nitrogen reported at around 31 percent after 95 days in previous studies, may even be an advantage, since lower concentrations of soluble nutrients reduce runoff and the eutrophication that follows it. The field trial, sown at Balruddery Farm in Angus in April 2024, took the test into conditions closer to those faced by real farmers. Here the team used Chlorella pellets and 24–4–14 NPK granules, both delivering an additional 61.6 kilograms of nitrogen per hectare to bring the soil up to the 118-kilogram target, arranged in a 3 by 3 Latin square design with nine plots per treatment. Emergence exceeded 99 percent in every plot. At harvest, dry grain yield was statistically indistinguishable between algae and mineral fertiliser plots, and both outyielded the unfertilised control by 42 and 59 percent respectively. Thousand grain weight, a key quality metric, was likewise equal between the two fertilised treatments and significantly higher than the control. Intriguingly, algae-fed plants produced slightly more grains per ear and longer ears than mineral-fertilised plants, though these differences did not translate into a yield advantage. The most novel and commercially sensitive part of the study came after harvest, when grain from each plot was malted in quadruplicate and analysed at Chivas Brothers’ Glen Keith Technical Centre. Malt quality determines whether barley can enter the premium brewing and distilling markets, and the team measured fine hot water extract strength, soluble nitrogen, total malt nitrogen and predicted spirit yield, the industry’s estimate of how much alcohol a tonne of malt will produce. On every one of these indicators except total malt nitrogen, malt from algae-grown barley was statistically indistinguishable from malt grown with mineral fertiliser. Both fertilised treatments produced malt with significantly higher extract strength and predicted spirit yield than the unfertilised control. The single difference, total malt nitrogen, actually favoured the algae treatment in one respect: algae-grown malt had lower nitrogen than mineral-grown malt, sitting as a significant intermediate between the control and mineral treatments. That lower nitrogen could prove a commercial bonus. The malting industry typically prefers grain nitrogen at the lower end of its target range, particularly for malt whisky distilling, and all values in this study fell below the typical industry maximum of 1.60 percent. If microalgal fertiliser consistently delivers lower grain and malt nitrogen while maintaining yield and extract quality, distillers seeking low-nitrogen malt may find it especially attractive. The researchers caution, however, that the malt in this experiment was under-modified, meaning the sugars and proteins of the endosperm were not fully mobilised during germination, likely due to poor germination conditions rather than insufficient malting time. The comparisons between treatments remain valid, but confirmation in properly modified malt from further field trials is still needed. The authors are equally candid about the hurdles that remain. Microalgae cultivated solely for fertiliser are not yet economically competitive with mineral products, but coupling algal cultivation to wastewater treatment, turning a costly waste stream into a saleable co-product, could change the calculus. For wastewater-grown

A bottle of The Macallan 1926 Fine & Rare 60 Year Old sold for a final price of $2.81 million on 9 October 2026, at Sotheby’s first live auction staged on The Macallan Estate in Speyside. Measured in US dollars, it is the highest price ever paid for a bottle of whisky, and it means Sotheby’s now holds the three highest whisky auction results on record. The sale marked 100 years since the 1926 spirit was distilled. One cask. Forty bottles. And a hundred years after the spirit first ran off the stills, a Macallan 1926 has once again rewritten the auction record books, this time in the place where it was made. On Thursday 9 October, a bottle of The Macallan 1926 Fine & Rare 60 Year Old sold for a final price of $2.81 million at “Live from The Macallan Estate”, the first live auction ever held at the Speyside distillery. In dollar terms it is now the most valuable bottle of whisky ever sold, overtaking the $2.71 million achieved by its sibling, The Macallan Adami 1926, at Sotheby’s London in November 2023. Sotheby’s auctioneer Jonny Fowle, the house’s Global Head of Whisky and Spirits, brought the hammer down in front of an invitation-only room. With this result, Sotheby’s now holds the top three prices ever paid for a single bottle of whisky at auction. Macallan 1926 at a glance Lot: 19, The Macallan Fine & Rare 60 Year Old 1926 Distilled: 1926 Bottled: 1986, at 60 years old ABV: 42.6% Size:70cl Cask: Single sherry cask, no. 263 Bottles drawn from the cask: 40 Pre-sale estimate: £1.7m to £2.2m Final price: $2.81m (including buyer’s premium) [EDITOR: add the official sterling figure from Sotheby’s results page] Sale:Live from The Macallan Estate, Sotheby’s, 9 October 2026 Location: The Macallan Estate, Speyside, Scotland What is The Macallan 1926? The Macallan 1926 is a single malt Scotch whisky distilled in 1926, filled into cask no. 263 and left to mature in sherry-seasoned European oak for six decades. When the cask was emptied in 1986, it yielded just 40 bottles, which at the time made it the oldest Macallan ever released. None of those 40 bottles went on general sale. The distillery offered them to its most important clients, and in doing so created the most collected bottling in the history of Scotch whisky. What makes the 1926 unusual is that the same liquid wears several different faces. Fourteen bottles carried The Macallan’s Fine & Rare label, the one sold this week. Twelve were dressed in labels designed by the British pop artist Sir Peter Blake, and a further twelve received artwork by the Italian painter Valerio Adami in 1993. The final two were left without labels, and one of those was later hand-painted by the Irish artist Michael Dillon. The Macallan has described the whisky as carrying dark fruit and black cherry, sticky dates and a long note of sweet, ancient oak. Few people will ever get to check that for themselves. Why the 1926 keeps breaking records The price history of the Macallan 1926 is, in effect, the price history of the modern whisky collecting market. In 1987, a year after bottling, a 1926 sold for £5,000, a world record for any spirit at the time. When a Fine & Rare bottle appeared at Christie’s in New York in 2007, it made roughly £45,000. Then the curve steepened. In 2018, Christie’s sold the Michael Dillon hand-painted bottle for £1.2 million, the first whisky ever to pass the million-pound mark. A year later, in October 2019, Sotheby’s offered a Fine & Rare bottle with an estimate of £350,000 to £450,000 and watched it climb to £1.5 million. In November 2023, the Adami bottle reached £2,187,500 at Sotheby’s London, almost three times its low estimate, becoming the most expensive bottle of wine or spirit ever sold at auction. This week’s result moves the dollar benchmark again, to $2.81 million. Put another way, at a standard 15ml measure a 70cl bottle holds around 46 pours, which works out at roughly $60,000 per dram. A small note for the collectors who track these things closely: the record is framed in US dollars. Sotheby’s set the estimate in pounds, and the 2023 Adami’s £2,187,500 remains the figure to compare against in sterling. [EDITOR: confirm sterling hammer and final price before publishing and adjust this paragraph if the 2026 bottle also tops the sterling record.] Coming home to Speyside after 100 years The setting matters as much as the number. This was the first live auction ever staged at The Macallan Estate, the distillery’s home on the banks of the River Spey, and it was timed to mark the centenary of the 1926 distillation. Cask 263 itself passed its 100th birthday in February 2026. The story behind that cask is one of the more human chapters in Scotch whisky. Janet “Nettie” Harbinson took over The Macallan after her husband died suddenly in 1918, at a time when most expected the business to be sold. The 1926 cask was laid down during her stewardship. Sixty years later it was her great-nephew, Allan Shiach, then chairman of The Macallan, who decided to bottle it. For a whisky that has spent almost four decades travelling between private collections and sale rooms in London and New York, there is something fitting about the bottle crossing the rostrum a short walk from where it was distilled. The Romantica Collection and the rest of the sale The 1926 was the headline, but it was not the only reason collectors made the journey to Speyside. Lot 1 was a one-off presentation of The Macallan Romantica Collection, consigned directly by the distillery. The Romantica Collection launched earlier this year to mark the 1926 centenary. It comes from a single sherry-seasoned European oak cask, no. 9925, filled in 1986, the very year the 1926 was bottled. The standard release runs to 258 bottles at 48.6% ABV in natural colour, split into 86 bottles each of an Adami, a Blake and a Dillon edition, and is sold only as a three-bottle set, reported at around $105,000. The auction set went further. It was bottled at a bespoke strength of 42.6%, matching the ABV of the 1926, and arrived in an oak cabinet built specifically for this sale. Alongside the bottles came original material donated by the three artists, including studio materials, preparatory artwork, personal letters and previously unseen collage elements. Around those two lots sat a remarkable cross-section of Macallan history, 42 lots in total. Highlights included The Macallan The Reach 81 Year Old 1940, the Macallan in Lalique Six Pillars Collection, a Fine & Rare 32 Year Old 1937 and a Fine & Rare 46 Year Old from cask #1851, distilled in 1955. There was also a full run of 25 Year Old Anniversary Malts distilled between 1957 and 1975, Handwritten Label bottlings from 1950 and 1957, and several cases of the 18 Year Old Sherry Oak from 1968 and 1970. What this means for whisky collecting For most of us, a $2.81 million bottle is a story rather than a shopping decision. But the result still tells the wider market something useful. It shows that demand at the very top remains intense for whisky with an unbroken provenance, a famous cask number and a story that collectors already know by heart. It also shows how much an auction house and a distillery can add by staging a sale with a sense of occasion. Holding this auction on the estate, in the centenary year, turned the 1926 from a trophy into a homecoming. If you collect Macallan at more realistic price points, the older Sherry Oak and Anniversary Malt bottlings in this sale are worth watching. Their results will give a more practical read on where vintage Macallan is trading in late 2026. FAQ What is The Macallan 1926? The Macallan 1926 is a single malt Scotch whisky distilled in 1926 and matured for 60 years in sherry-seasoned European oak cask no. 263. It was bottled in 1986 at 42.6% ABV, and the cask produced only 40 bottles, released in Fine & Rare, Peter Blake, Valerio Adami and unlabelled versions. How much did the Macallan 1926 sell for at The Macallan Estate? The Macallan 1926 Fine & Rare 60 Year Old sold

Celebrity whisky has become one of the industry’s busiest categories. Hardly a month seems to pass without another actor, musician or sporting icon lending their name to a bottle, usually accompanied by polished launch films, carefully crafted origin stories and promises of authenticity. Some of those collaborations have worked brilliantly. Many have struggled to convince seasoned whisky drinkers that there was ever much of a connection beyond a licensing agreement. The problem is rarely the celebrity. It is the order in which these projects are conceived. Too often, the famous name comes first and the whisky follows. Quick whisky question Single malt is everywhere, but what does it mean? We want to know what the word “single” means to you. Three quick questions, under a minute. ✓ Thank you — your response has been recorded! Something went wrong. Please try again. Gordon & MacPhail’s new collaboration with Sir Kenny Dalglish feels refreshingly different because it reverses that process. After spending time with both the whiskies and the people behind the project, I came away convinced this is less a celebrity whisky than a celebration of mature Scotch and the stories exceptional whisky can preserve across generations. The whisky already has its own provenance. Dalglish simply gives us another way to understand it. Rather than creating a whisky around one of football’s greatest names, Gordon & MacPhail has used one of Scotland’s most remarkable collections of maturing spirit to tell the story of a life through five carefully chosen vintages. Dalglish identified the years that shaped him personally before the whisky team began searching their warehouses for casks distilled during those exact moments in time. The result is a collection that feels deeply personal without ever becoming sentimental. What Will Whisky Look Like in 2027? Voices from Whisky Live Paris READ THE STORYIt also demonstrates something only a handful of companies in Scotland could realistically attempt. During the tasting, Stephen Rankin, Gordon & MacPhail’s Director of Prestige and a fourth-generation member of the Urquhart family, explained that the project only exists because of more than 130 years of patient cask management. Gordon & MacPhail has maintained maturing stocks from every vintage since 1948, building an archive unlike almost anything else in Scotch whisky. Those stocks allow the company to revisit almost any significant year and, rather than finding a single bottle from that vintage, choose between multiple casks and multiple distilleries before selecting the whisky that best captures both the year and the individual. Listening to Rankin describe that archive, it became obvious that the Dalglish collection is really an introduction to something much bigger. Vintage Moments is designed as a bespoke experience, allowing private clients to identify five defining years from their own lives before working alongside Gordon & MacPhail to select whiskies from those exact vintages. Dalglish simply happens to be the first public example of what that process looks like. As a lifelong Liverpool supporter, there was naturally an added layer of interest for me. Like millions of others, I have grown up hearing stories about “King Kenny” and watching his career become part of football folklore. What surprised me, though, was how little time he actually spent talking about himself. Almost every answer during the tasting became a story about somebody else. His parents. Marina. Jock Stein. Jack Walker. Teammates. Supporters. Family. Even when discussing some of the defining moments in British football history, he instinctively redirected the conversation towards the people who helped shape them. That humility runs quietly through the entire collection. His first vintage, 1951, marks his birth in Dalmarnock and the values that would shape everything that followed. The 1967 whisky reflects watching Celtic become the first British club to win the European Cup, inspiring a young academy player to believe that Scottish football could compete with anyone. The 1974 vintage celebrates marrying Marina, perhaps the most touching moment of the afternoon when Dalglish reflected that she had never stood behind him throughout his career but had always stood beside him. The 1977 whisky marks the difficult decision to leave Glasgow for Liverpool, while 1995 recognises the beginning of his Blackburn Rovers chapter (coincidentally the same year Everton last won a trophy). The chronology is compelling, but it would mean very little if the whiskies themselves failed to deliver. Fortunately, they do. What impressed me throughout the tasting was that Gordon & MacPhail never appeared interested in selecting the oldest cask, the rarest distillery or the bottle with the highest theoretical auction value. Dalglish tasted a number of cask samples from each year before choosing the whiskies he personally preferred. That simple decision keeps the collection grounded in flavour rather than prestige. The 1951 Glen Grant immediately demonstrated why Gordon & MacPhail has earned such a reputation for mature whisky. At more than seven decades old it still possessed extraordinary freshness, opening with beautifully integrated orchard fruit before revealing soft orange marmalade, polished oak, toasted hazelnuts and gentle tobacco. Old whisky often impresses because it has survived. This impressed because it remained so effortlessly alive. The 1967 Longmorn offered greater richness, layering dark fruits, treacle, citrus peel and antique oak without becoming heavy or drying. It was one of those whiskies that seemed to evolve continuously in the glass, rewarding patience rather than demanding attention. The 1974 Strathisla carried many of the classic characteristics that mature sherry casks can produce, with coffee beans, dried fruits, fruitcake and Seville orange sitting comfortably alongside remarkably elegant oak. It felt complete rather than dramatic, and perhaps summed up the entire collection better than any other bottle. The 1977 Benromach brought freshness back into the flight. Citrus, stone fruits and delicate spice gave it wonderful energy despite nearly five decades in wood, while the 1995 Glentauchers reminded everyone that Gordon & MacPhail’s expertise extends far beyond extremely old whisky. Bright citrus, raspberry, vanilla and dark chocolate created a whisky with maturity but also real vibrancy. Each bottle was distinct, yet together they felt remarkably coherent. The presentation reflects that same philosophy. Every one of the fifteen sets arrives in a beautifully crafted wooden case accompanied by a signed book explaining the significance of each chosen year. Gordon & MacPhail has even included unique facts within every presentation, meaning no two sets are identical. It would have been easy to rely on luxury packaging alone, but here it feels like an extension of the narrative rather than decoration for its own sake. The £100,000 asking price will inevitably dominate many headlines, yet focusing exclusively on that figure rather misses the point. The real significance lies in what Gordon & MacPhail is attempting to create. Vintage Moments transforms mature whisky into something deeply personal. Age statements become secondary to memory. Provenance becomes as emotional as it is technical. That strikes me as a far more interesting direction for luxury Scotch than simply releasing another anonymous fifty-year-old. Celebrity collaborations are unlikely to disappear from whisky any time soon, nor should they. The strongest ambassadors bring new audiences into the category and genuinely care about the spirit they represent. The weakest feel interchangeable, where almost anybody could have occupied the same place on the label. This collection avoids that entirely because neither element overshadows the other. The stories belong to Sir Kenny Dalglish. The whisky belongs to Gordon & MacPhail. Together they create