Brora and Port Ellen - two unusual barrels at auction
Sotheby's auction house, in partnership with Diageo, has just announced its intention to hold an auction of two extremely rare and fabulously expensive whisky casks. We are talking about one barrel from the Brora distillery and one from Port Ellen.
We are talking about Brora barrel No. 480 from 1982 and Port Ellen barrel No. 1145 from 1979. The barrel contents from Brora should be enough to fill 145 bottles, while Port Ellen is potentially 102 bottles. It is estimated that the Brora barrel will reach a final selling price of 700,000. pounds, while, according to experts, Port Ellen 1979 will break the £1 million mark and be sold for as much as £1.2 million. Diageo will donate 5% of the final amount auctioned to the charity Care International, which supports those in need affected by the war in Ukraine.
Bidding begins today, May 31, and is scheduled to end on June 14. According to The Spirits Business website, lucky buyers will be given the option to leave the barrels in storage for further maturation for up to another five years. The barrel sale is part of a program of exhibitions and events organized by Sotheby's at the company's new headquarters in New Bond Street, London, and linked to the celebrations of Queen Elizabeth II's platinum jubilee.
The sale of two barrels from legendary Scottish distilleries also includes what Sotheby's calls an "art experience." In the case of Brora, the new owner will be able to travel to the north of Scotland in the company of photographer Trey Radcliff, who will take a series of photographs of the landscapes surrounding the distillery. From among them, the new owner of the barrel will be able to choose this photograph, which will be used when designing labels for the bottled whisky.
As for Port Ellen, graphic artist Ini Archibong will prepare a work to capture the light of Port Ellen. Graphics prepared by him will also be used in the development of labels for bottles of whisky, located in the auctioned cask.
Both Brora and Port Ellen are on Diageo's list of multi-million dollar investments. In their case, the goal is to possibly faithfully recreate the distilleries that closed in 1983 and restart whisky production in them. In Brora, the process was completed in May 2021, when the rebuilt distillery was ceremonially opened and the whiskey began to be churned out. Work is still underway in Port Ellen, with the idea here being not only to restore the old distillery unchanged. A second distillery is also to be built here, a state-of-the-art experimental facility where the search for a new path, new whisky flavor profiles will be conducted.
Both Port Ellen and Brora suffered from the overproduction crisis that hit the Scottish distilling industry in the early 1980s. last century. As a result, a whole series of Scottish distilleries closed down, and many even eventually physically disappeared from the face of the earth, giving way to shopping centers, residential or other types of establishments. The products of some of them occasionally appear on the market, bottled either by the successors of the then owners or by independent distributors. However, no other captures the imagination of connoisseurs and collectors as it does with Brora and Port Ellen. The latter survives alongside a huge industrial malting plant, supplying barley malt to all distilleries on Islay and some distilleries in other regions. Brora stood dormant and forgotten for many years, and was leaning next to Clynelish, built in 1967. Interestingly, the name of the new distillery originally belonged to today's Brora, founded in 1819. The name change came in 1969, when the old distillery, closed two years earlier, was restarted, following the launch of the new Clynelish.
The House of Whisky Online has on offer several editions of Brora and quite good port Ellen collection - whiskeys that are the object of desire of many a collector. We encourage you to familiarize yourself with our offer.
[31.05.2022 / photo: Sotheby's]