A single bottle of Japanese whisky has set a new benchmark at Sotheby's. The Yamazaki 50 Year Old 2005 First Release sold for US$765,000, or HK$6 million, at the house's Hong Kong sale last week, the highest price the distillery has ever achieved at Sotheby's and the second most expensive Asian spirit to change hands at auction.

The bottle is among the rarest Japanese whiskies ever produced. Only fifty bottles of the First Release were made in 2005, bottled at 54 percent alcohol, and most were distributed within Japan. It appeared alongside the Second Release of 2007 and the Third Release of 2011, the first time all three editions of the Yamazaki 50 Year Old have been offered together in a single sale, a grouping Sotheby's described as a landmark for collectors of Japanese whisky.

The result came shortly after another Japanese whisky record at Sotheby's. A bottle of Karuizawa 1960 sold for US$625,000 at the house's first Nightcap festival in New York, the most valuable bottle of Japanese whisky Sotheby's has ever sold. The Hong Kong sales also featured two 1960 vintages from the closed Karuizawa distillery, the Prototype 47 Year Old single cask number 5627 and the Prototype 48 Year Old single cask number 4123, alongside bottles from the Noh, Geisha, Mount Fuji and Samurai series and single casks distilled from the 1960s through to 2012.

For context, the most expensive bottle of Japanese whisky sold at auction remains a Yamazaki 50 bottled in 2023, which made 902,600 euros at Bonhams in Hong Kong in May 2026. Sotheby's wine and spirits department has had a strong year, reporting sales of US$49.25 million across 29 auctions in the first half of 2026, up seven percent on the previous year, with a 94 percent sell-through rate and whisky the most valuable single lot for a sixth consecutive year.