An iconic Scotch brand is again tapping the talent of one of Great Britain’s most iconic artists.
On Wednesday, the Macallan announces Anecdotes of Ages, the Scottish distillery’s third collaboration with artist Sir Peter Blake, who gained global fame when he co-created the cover of the Beatles’ 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album.
The centerpiece of the collection is comprised of 13 bottles of 1967 whisky, each labelled with an original artwork by Blake in his iconic collage style. In each one, Blake explores a different aspect of the Macallan’s estate and history.
One of the bottles, titled A New Era of Advertising—a cheeky name, given that it’s hard to remember an era before marketing—will be auctioned by Sotheby’s on March 13, alongside the Bo Johnston Collection. That store of single malt Scotch whiskies, accrued in the 1980s by the late South Carolina collector, included a Macallan 50 Year Old Anniversary Malt from 1928. A 1926 vintage, also with Blake artwork, hammered for more than $1 million in 2018.
The auction will raise funds for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s diversity, equity, access, and inclusion initiatives, intended to “increase free access and develop engagement with a variety of audiences.” Sotheby’s estimate for the bottle is a wide range: from $125,000 to $750,000, meaning it’s anybody’s guess.
Rare whisky, though, has been on a tear, outperforming every other luxury asset as an alternative investment. It’s reliable, too, says Freeman Ho of both Rare Finds Worldwide, a whisky brokerage and investment platform, and Hong Kong-based Rare Single Malts. The latter, a private equity fund launched in 2020 to invest in whisky casks, sees assets appreciate 15% per year on average, Ho says. The individual bottle market, while riskier, has potential for even greater returns.
“For true whisky experts who follow the market very, very closely,” he explains, “if they are able to pick the right items, they can achieve a great return within a short period of time, which hugely exceeds 15% per year. According to the Knight Frank Wealth Report, if you invested in rare bottles, on average, you should have seen [a return of] around 580% for the past 10 years.”
Buying into casks, Ho says, is like real estate, while investing in bottles is closer to buying art—especially when it comes to these so-called unicorn bottles or unicorn collections.
“It’s a bit more about the hype that the auctioneer and the auction houses are actually able to create,” Ho says. “It’s as much about the artists, the topics, the story behind it as it is about the spirit.”
Of course, the difference is that with art and real estate, you can appreciate them without devaluing them. Drain that bottle of whisky, and not only do you crater its resale value, you make the remaining bottles on the market that much more precious.