Fortunately, for the winner of the March 13 auction, there’s a workaround: Along with the bottle, the winner gets a VIP visit to the Macallan distillery (when it’s safe to do so). All of their spirits are available by the dram, so you can have your Blake and sip it, too.
For everyone else, the Macallan will archive another bottle in the series, and the remaining 11 will be put up for sale through traditional retail channels, though the prices for those won’t be released until after the auction. Each will feature the original hand-cut and glued artworks by Blake.
Available immediately, a 322-bottle Down to Work edition, with reproduction labels (but the same 1967 whisky inside), has a suggested retail price of $83,000 per bottle. A broader release, called An Estate, A Community, and a Distillery, is in a custom box with a scroll printed with Blake’s artwork and sells $1,200 per bottle, but has no indication of what liquid is inside.
“When we started talking about this collaboration with Sir Peter Blake,” says Sarah Burgess, the Macallan’s lead whisky maker, “there was nothing in terms of what kind of whisky it was going to be, what age is it going to be, what it’s going to look like.”
Her inspiration came during a pre-pandemic visit to Blake’s London studio, itself the stuff of legend. A former iron monger’s warehouse, it contains his collection of artifacts, ranging from a huge assortment of hats and model ships to the waxwork figure of boxer Sonny Liston seen in the front row of the Sgt. Pepper’s cover.
“When you look at Sir Peter’s collage artwork,” Burgess says, “you look, and then you look again, and you look again, and there’s always something different that you see each time.”
That spirit of surprise guided her in shaping the 1967 spirit. Of course there was the traditional Macallan flavor profile—dried fruit (in this case, fig), cinnamon, clove, and oak. But then, wanting to reward closer tasting with “something more interesting, something unusual,” she blended in whisky that highlighted notes of hazelnut, strawberry, and chocolate.
Rather than being captivated by Macallan’s strikingly modern, $195 million distillery and visitors center, which opened in 2018 and was designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, the team behind London’s Millennium Dome, Blake draws inspiration from its environs. He says he was particularly taken with the fauna around the modest wood hut belonging to the riverkeeper, or ghillie, alongside the River Spey, which runs through the estate.
“I think the thing that excited me most was that the area around the distillery is one of the few places where the red squirrel is still seen.” The ghillie, Blake says, “befriended one of the squirrels and fed it every day,” naming it Malcolm. Both the red squirrel and the ghillie are featured on the bottle called The River Spey.
Small curiosities abound in the bottle labels: Among the figures Blake includes in the New Era of Advertising bottle going up for auction is Allan Shiach, the distillery’s chairman in 1979. Today, Shiach writes under the name Allan Scott and is credited as the co-creator of the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit.