Yes, well sort of. There are many scotch whisky sites out there. So many that I couldn’t find the one I was looking for to post as a cite. That website offered dram bottles of some of the more expensive scotches (in this case more expensive means more than €1500 for a full bottle) for purchase. I was going to buy a couple but the ones I wanted were no longer on offer at the time I wanted to buy(the dram bottles I mean). Which was probably for the best, for me.
Short answer: You can’t.
Slightly longer answer: You still can’t.
Whisky Advocate had a fairly comprehensive article on just this subject in the Winter 2023 edition. Buying casks of bourbon is easy. Several big distilleries have programs like that. But since none of the Scotch producers will export a barrel, bottle it for you or ship it overseas except through the 3-tiered distribution system, you are pretty much SOL if you want your own cask of Macallan. Even if you did manage to get ahold of one and get it into the States, they won’t let you use the name, symbols, label or anything else from the distillery.
The problem is that not every barrel turns out to be excellent. Every child could grow up and become president. Not every child will.
I take it you’d have to have enough experience with Scotch to have developed a palate that could tell the difference?
I rarely drink wine these days but can still distinguish a decent from an excellent from a holy cow this is incredible! wine. Many years ago I was offered a taste of Scotch but didn’t care for it, so never developed a taste for the stuff. So I take it a MaCallan of any vintage would be wasted on me, right?
I have to wonder how many bottles of the most expensive Scotches ever get drunk.
Most of them. They get bought by Asian billionaires and are used to toast their latest mistresses or shit like that. The Japanese market for high-end Scotch is insane.
As I understand it (from a distillery tour in Scotland) the evaporation takes place in the cask, and that is one of the reasons aged scotch is more expensive (and better). I don’t think your brother lost any from the glass bottle.
ETA: I guess we’re saying the same thing Nevermind.
Sigh. I should have figured as much – the rich have always looked for status symbols they can conspicuously consume.
In 1986 Macallen bottled 40 bottles of 60 year old Scotch. 12 had labels from artist Valerio Adami and are called Macallen Adami, these bottles have been the most sought after bottles of whiskey produced. One sold last year for 2.7 million dollars. A guy in England bought one of the boxes off Ebay. It is currently listed for sale for about 141,000 pounds ($178,000).
Macallan 1926 60 Year Old Valerio Adami Display Case – The Whiskey Wash
Oregon has state licensed liquor stores and there is a commission that oversees it. Not long before we left there was a big scandal brewing because people in government were bogarting the Pappy Van Winkle and other high-end bourbons for their friends and for their own liquor cabinets.
The oldest alcoholic beverage I’ve had was a 40-year-old white Port. It was amazing.
Ah, a man of good taste. One of the mere plebes would have settled for Coke or Pepsi.
LOL … $178,921 for a bottle of Scotch, except you don’t get the bottle or the Scotch, just the display case! The actual bottle is a couple of million $ more! Some people are genuinely nuts. If you Google “Macallan Adami” it’s actually quite an ordinary-looking whisky bottle; the $90,000 bottle in the OP looks much more elegant.
I knew about the angel’s share (there’s quite a good movie by that name, about a gang of miscreants trying to get their hands on a cask of a very rare Scotch) but that was an interesting and informative article about whisky-making.
I note with some amusement that they stated that the lowest amount of angel’s share was in the cold of the Scottish Highlands where it was about 2% a year, so a 12-year-old Scotch would have lost 24% of its original volume after 12 years. Err, no, an obvious math fallacy there! But one can be kind and forgive a rough approximation – the correct answer is about 22.5%.
Back in the days when a friend and I were younger and more inclined to throw money around, we went through a period of trying out fairly exotic liquors, though definitely nothing even close to the four-figure range. Neither of us are Scotch drinkers so we mostly focused on wines and some liqueurs. I recall a wondrous and complex 40-year-old Trockenberenauslese – a Sauterne-like sweet German wine that isn’t normally aged – and a special edition Grand Marnier in a beautiful bottle. I don’t remember exactly what was special about it but it’s usually the quality of the cognac. It was certainly very very good, and I kept the bottle on display for years.
Wouldn’t that be a smaller amount if only the alcohol is evaporating? It is probably around 140 proof at the beginning of the aging process.
You definitely lose it from evaporation in the bottle, albeit very slowly. If a bottle is stored for a very long time people will wrap/seal the cork to prevent this.
And any percentage would also be complicated in that the amount that evaporates probably depends on a surface area of some sort, not the volume.
Still, for low percentages, any approximation would probably be pretty close.
126 - 127 proof. That’s been determined to be the “sweet spot” as far as aging and minimizing the Angel’s Share. Bourbon can’t be over 125 when it is barreled, by law.
The relevant surface area is the amount of the liquid exposed to the wood of the barrel, which according to the posted article “breathes” the Scotch in and out and over the years imparts colour, flavour, and mellowness, but that’s where most of the loss comes from, since small amounts seep through to the outside. The relationship of that surface area to the liquid volume in a barrel is obviously non-linear but probably close enough for a reasonable approximation.
Am I wrong to think spirits, once bottled do not age? If unopened do they age a little?
Or is this more about truly vintage whisky just being good stuff?
I’m not sure what the last sentence has to do with the others?
But no, whisky doesn’t age in the bottle. An age statement is how long it was in a barrel; whisky gets it’s flavor from the oak itself.