Ardbeg barrel breaks all records

When we read reports of successive price records beaten by individual bottles, collections or casks of whisky, usually the name Macallan appears in the headline. This time, however, it was different, and the record that has just been set will probably not soon be broken.

Barrel Ardbeg 1975 was sold to an Asian collector for the dizzying sum of 16 million pounds.

When a deal was struck in 1997 for the sale of the then-defunct distillery, the amount of money Glenmorangie plc bought Ardbeg for was £7 million. Now, more than twice as much has been paid for a single barrel. Even if you take into account inflation and the possible cost of storing this barrel for another quarter of a century, the sale of this one barrel returned the distillery's purchase costs. More than. If that weren't enough - the barrel in question was then included in the price of the entire purchase. Along with the remaining stock of whisky maturing in warehouses and the entire distillery.

No less interesting than the price paid for the aforementioned barrel are the details of the entire transaction. And they are quite unusual.

The cask in question is Cask No 3, a sherry butt, which is a cask of about 500 liters that previously held fortified Spanish oloroso sherry wine (dry sherry). Since July 25, 1975, this cask has held whisky from the Ardbeg distillery. It began its life as two barrels - one of bourbon and the other of sherry oloroso. In March 2014 Dr. Bill Lumsden, director of the. of whisky creation at Ardbeg, decided to pour the contents of these two casks into one refill sherry butt. Since then, the whisky contained in this cask has continued to mature under the watchful eye of Lumsden and other Ardbeg specialists. The whisky is therefore now 46 years old, and its strength has so far fallen to 48%. Ardbeg barrels from the 1970s, still in the distillery's warehouses, can be counted on your fingers. This fact, too, must have had a not insignificant impact on the price of the barrel. If the whisky contained in it were bottled now, it would be the oldest Ardbeg in the distillery's history. However, no one intends to bottle the whole thing at once, as is customary in such situations.

Usually, the price a customer pays for a barrel of whiskey includes only the contents and packaging. This time, however, the service requested by the client is incomparably more complex. The current contents of the barrel would be enough to fill about 440 bottles. However, its new owner has requested that only 88 bottles of whiskey aged 46 years be bottled for her, leaving the rest in the barrel, in the distillery's warehouse. Next year another 88 barrels will be bottled, but by then it will be a 48-year-old whisky. In another year, the procedure will be repeated. And once again. Until the owner of the cask becomes the owner of the Ardbeg collection between 46 and 50 years old.

The price of £16 million in this case includes all additional costs, so further storage of the cask in the warehouse, insurance, bottling according to the schedule described above, labels, taxes, as well as a visit by the owner of the cask to the distillery. Normally, these costs are added to the price of the barrel, but in this case, this unique arrangement was decided upon. In other words, the owner of this unusual barrel will receive a portion of new bottles of whisky each year, for which any additional costs have already been paid in advance. And he can even go to the island of Islay and pay a free visit to his whisky at the Ardbeg bonded warehouse.

Ardbeg has pledged to donate round £1 million from the deal to charity on Islay. This amount will be spread over the entire five-year term of the contract concluded with the client.

Those who have had the opportunity to taste the whisky taken from cask No. 3 say that we are indeed dealing here with a whisky of exceptional quality. Just a glance at Ardbeg ratings from the 1970s., editions bottled earlier, on other occasions, before it became so rare and valuable as to predict with high probability the quality of the contents of this unique and most expensive barrel in the world.

The Ardbeg distillery was founded in 1815, placing it among the oldest Scotch whisky producers in Scotland as a whole. On the scale of southern Islay, however, this seems to be the norm - Lagavulin has been in business since 1816 and Laphroaig since 1815. A clear outlier here is Bowmore, on the bottles of which you will find information about the establishment of the distillery as early as 1779. It is worth remembering that the islands had slightly different regulations than on the mainland in Scotland, where it was not until an 1823 law opened up the possibility of legal distilling development. Ardbeg, like its neighbors on the south coast of Islay, has always (with few exceptions) produced whisky with a strong peat-smoke influence, valued by blenders as a sort of spice when putting together blended whiskies. After all, all it takes is a touch of peaty, smoky whiskey to add character to even uninteresting blends. Owned by Hiram Walker at the time, the distillery was one of the first victims of the overproduction crisis that decimated Scottish distilleries in the 1980s. Production at Ardbeg ceased in 1981. The distillery reopened in 1989, on a fairly limited basis, but less than a decade later, in 1996, its new owner, Allied Lyons, was forced to close the plant again. Ardbeg proved to be a superfluous burden for the company, which at the time also included Laphroaig, which fully satisfied the company's needs when it came to peaty, smoky whisky.

Just around the corner, however, a boom period was already lurking, especially for the robustly flavored, strongly peaty whiskies from Islay. This boom was correctly recognized by Glenmorangie plc, which bought Ardbeg in 1997 for £7 million. The rest is history. Ardbeg began by bottling stock left in warehouses by previous owners, and over time - tentatively at first, in the form of young "discussion" editions - began bottling distillate already produced after the relaunch of the. Few remember that during the first period of the "new" Ardbeg, at the turn of the century, whisky from the 1975 vintage was part of the distillery's core offering, even before the Ardbeg TEN edition, still on the market today, appeared.

The chances of even one bottle of Ardbeg 1975 from cask No. 3 appearing on our shelves are, let's face it, slim. However, this does not mean that in the current offer of the House of Whisky Online no interesting editions from the 1970s. We invite you to visit and see for yourself what we have prepared for our customers there.


[11.07.2022 / photo: Rajmund Matuszkiewicz]