Sotheby's broke new ground on 9 October 2026 by staging its first live auction inside a working Scotch whisky distillery. "Live from The Macallan Estate" played to an invitation-only room of around fifty of the world's leading whisky collectors in Speyside, with additional bids arriving by telephone. The undisputed centrepiece was a bottle of The Macallan Fine & Rare 60 Years Old 1926, which drew a winning bid of £2,125,000, equivalent to about $2,807,905. The result lands just behind the current benchmark for a single bottle of whisky: an Adami-labelled 1926 that sold at Sotheby's in London in 2023 for £2,187,500. The narrow gap between the two sterling totals reflects shifting exchange rates rather than cooling demand. In dollar terms, the Speyside sale set a new all-time high, and within The Macallan's own celebrated Fine & Rare Collection the 1926 is now an outright record holder. The whisky behind the numbers traces to a single sherry-seasoned oak cask, numbered 263, filled in 1926 and left to mature for sixty years before being bottled in 1986. Only forty bottles were drawn. Fourteen carried the Fine & Rare label, twelve bore labels designed by Sir Peter Blake, another twelve labels by Valerio Adami, and two were left unlabelled — one of those was subsequently hand-painted by the Irish artist Michael Dillon. It was the first time a 1926 from this cask had appeared at auction since the 2023 record. The timing was deliberate: the sale marked exactly one hundred years since the spirit was distilled. All forty-two lots found buyers for a combined £3.3 million (about $4.4 million), with the wider line-up drawn almost entirely from private collections — Anniversary Malts, Select Reserve bottlings and earlier Fine & Rare releases among them. Sotheby's global head of whisky and spirits called the evening a landmark for whisky collecting, staged in the centenary year of the vintage itself.