The unnamed collector is ready to obtain 440 bottles of single malt in whole from ‘Cask No. 3’ – 88 annually over the following 5 years, giving her a vertical collection of 1975 Ardbegs bottled at 46, 47, 48, 49 and 50 years previous by 2026.
The sum paid equates to greater than £36,000 per bottle, and is greater than 16 occasions the document quantity paid at public sale for a single cask of whisky – set in April this yr, when a non-public purchaser from the US paid £915,500 (hammer worth) for a 1988 Macallan cask.
Nevertheless, non-public cask transactions of this kind are far tougher to trace because the sums concerned usually are not at all times publicly out there.
Older Ardbegs are particularly uncommon as a result of, throughout the Seventies, a lot of the Islay distillery’s output was utilized in blends. Ardbeg was closed for many of the Nineteen Eighties and operated solely sporadically after 1989, earlier than reopening absolutely in 1997.
The whisky in Cask No. 3 was distilled at Ardbeg on 25 November 1975, when the distillery nonetheless malted its barley on-site, and the spirit was initially crammed into two casks – one ex-Bourbon and the opposite ex-oloroso Sherry.
It matured for 38 years till 31 March 2014, when Ardbeg’s director of whisky creation, Dr Invoice Lumsden, determined to mix the 2 casks, ‘marrying’ them in a refill ex-oloroso Sherry butt designed to present solely a refined affect from the oak.
‘Cask No. 3 is a rare style of Ardbeg’s previous,’ stated Dr Lumsden, who will oversee the cask’s ongoing maturation. ‘Its aromas are nutty, natural and smoky, whereas its tastes of tar, espresso espresso and spearmint have an astonishing finesse for a whisky of such age.
‘So little inventory survives from this period that this cask actually is considered one of a sort. I stay up for exploring the way it continues to evolve over the following 5 years.’
Ardbeg proprietor Moët Hennessy has introduced that it’ll donate £1m out of the £16m proceeds from the cask sale to causes on the isle of Islay.
