According to Drink Business Review, Master of Malt, a British online spirits retailer, has launched the oldest and most expensive bottle of Scotch whiskey. The newly launched whiskey is 105 years old, distilled on February 17, 1906 at the Aisla T’Orten distillery in the Highlands.
A fire destroyed the buildings after just one day of operation, though a single ceremonial cask survived without damage. The cask, a sherry butt, has spent the majority of the past century in the basement of Aberdeen-based historian, Allie Sisell.
Sisell contacted Master of Malt in 2010, and then sold the cask later in the year for an undisclosed amount of money. The whisky was bottled in 2011 after 105 years in a cask.
Ben Ellefsen, Master of Malt’s sales director, said the company hopes that the lucky buyer of the whisky will enjoy and savour it, rather than let it languish in a presentation case.
“As with all our bottlings, from our 8 year old Blend right the way through to our 50 year old Speyside Single malt, we’ve left out the extra cost incurred by fancy packaging,” Ellefsen said. “The fact that this whiskey is on sale for almost a million pounds is a direct reflection of its unique provenance, and the cost of the construction of the distillery in the early part of the twentieth century in order to produce, sadly, just one bottle of unique spirit.”
The spirit was discovered eight months ago by a Scottish historian, and has been launched with a price tag of GBP 870,000, making it the most expensive spirit in history.
