A century ago, a barrel was filled with new make spirit at the Macallan, aged for 60 years, and bottled in 1986. That whisky would go on to set a record as being the most valuable bottle of whisky to be sold at auction when it was purchased for about $2.7 million dollars in 2023 (a bottle of Irish whiskey from the Craft Irish Whiskey Co. beat that by about $100,000 a year later). To commemorate the 1926 vintage, and perhaps to one day rival its auction sale, the distillery is releasing the new Romantica Collection, which comes a single cask of whisky distilled in 1986 and aged for *nearly 40 years. Robb Report spoke to master distiller Euan Kennedy to find out more about this new extremely limited release.
The Romantica Collection consists of 258 bottles that came from cask number 9925, a sherry-seasoned European oak barrel that spent the last 39 years and four months years maturing at the distillery, bottled at 48.6 percent ABV. Compare that to the Macallan 1926, which as mentioned before was aged for 60 years and yielded just 40 bottles (or at least that was all that was released). According to Kennedy, this project was five years in the making, and the whisky is unique in that it is actually slightly smoky, an uncommon characteristic for the Macallan. “When we received the creative brief, we knew we wanted to go with a whisky from 1986 to tell that story, and there was only one cask it could be,” he told Robb Report. “The whisky itself in terms of character is quite unusual for the Macallan, carrying just a touch of peat smoke. It is remarkable that you can get that sense of being transported back to a different generation through this particular cask, which is one of the reasons why we selected it.”
