Some of Scotland’s most high-profile whisky brands faced contrasting fates during a brace of recent auctions.
Bottles of The Dalmore and Bowmore fell short of their pre-sale estimates, while a lot featuring The Balvenie failed to find a buyer.
‘The Rare’, the third bottle in The Dalmore’s ‘Luminary’ series, fetched HK$400,000 (£38,690) during Sotheby’s spirits auction in Hong Kong, falling short of 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 architecture firm Foster + Partners.
Only two sculptures were made to accompany this year’s edition in the Luminary series, with the second due to go on display at The Dalmore’s distillery near Alness, in the Highlands.
The whisky was matured in American white oak ex-bourbon barrels, before being finished in a complex set of casks: vintage 1980 Calvados; 1940 Colheita Port; Tawny Port; 40-year-old Pedro Ximénez Sherry; and Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
Proceeds from the sale of the bottle were donated to the Victoria & Albert (V&A) Museum in Dundee, which opened in 2018 and has received support from The Dalmore through a partnership that began in 2020, including donations of more than £200,000.
Kieran Healey-Ryder, global head of communications at Whyte & Mackay, the distiller that owns The Dalmore, told Decanter: ‘The beauty of this partnership has been that we’ve worked with Sotheby’s for five years alongside V&A Dundee.
‘We’ve had conversations with architects about the balance between the flair and form, the style and structure, of our whisky.
‘Each of the architects who we’ve worked with over these three editions has led on the creation of the whisky, from the blending through to the flavour notes.’
A bottle of 54-year-old Bowmore also failed to reach its pre-sale valuation of between £140,000 and £220,000, changing hands at Sotheby’s online whisky auction for £112,500.
The ‘Bowmore ARC-54: Iridos Edition’ included a decanter designed by Aston Martin, part of a long-running partnership between the Islay distillery and the luxury car 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, were donated to communities on Islay, while money from the latest sale will fund projects in communities surrounding owner Suntory’s other Scottish distilleries: Ardmore, Auchentoshan and Glen Garioch.
However, the same auction failed to find a buyer for ‘The Balvenie 50-Year-Old Private Cask #16560 Trunk’, a collection 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 said the auction marked the first appearance by any bottles from The Balvenie’s rare cask programme.
Each of the 220 bottles filled from the rare cask – housed in 22 wooden chests – is owned by a single collector, who donated the lot to raise money for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and The King’s Trust, formerly The Prince’s Trust, a charity founded in 1976 to ‘improve the lives of disadvantaged young people in the UK’.
