AS sales of rare whisky continue to soar, a leading auction house is offering whisky casks and bottles worth up to £1 million in Hong Kong this week.
Bonhams will offer Scotland’s liquid gold next Friday with the top lots all expected to fetch six-figure sums.
They include a Macallan 1928 50-year-old that was bottled in 1983. The bottle is accompanied by a personal letter from the then-Macallan chairman, Allan G Shiach, and anyone looking for a movie connection should know that Shiach was also a top screenwriter using his pseudonym Allan Scott.
Rare Islay-distilled whisky is to the fore in the sale with a a Sherry Cask of Bowmore 1997 yielding 321 bottles up for sale at an asking price of around £200,000 and an American Oak cask of Laphroaig distilled in 1998 and yielding 163 bottle, which is expected to fetch at least £60,000.
No fewer than five bottles of Macallan Lalique are up for sale, their ages ranging from 55 to 65 years.
Unless there is an unexpected bid or two, the lots will not be able to match the world-record price for a bottle of whisky. That record was set for a single bottle of Macallan 1926 sold at Christie’s last November. It had a hand-painted label by Irish artist Michael Dillon that pushed the price to £1.2m.
Bonhams is doing a Scottish double this week with its annual sale of Scottish art in Edinburgh on Wednesday. As well as works by the Scottish Colourists there are paintings for sale by John Bellany, Jack Vettriano and John Byrne, whose portrait of the actress Edith MacArthur was painted while she was starring in Byrne’s reworking of Chekov’s Uncle Varick at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh in 2004. Top lots are expected to be paintings by Joan Eardley and Francis Cadell, as well as Alexander Nasmyth’s 19th century painting of the Old Tolbooth in Edinburgh, with all expected to make up £50,000.
Bonhams say: “The Scottish Sale sources the best of Scottish art worldwide. The market remains buoyant for quality, market-fresh paintings by the Scottish Colourists, Maclauchlan Milne, Eardley, Colquhoun, Ramsay, Raeburn, Wilkie, the Glasgow Boys and many others.”
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