What’s It Like to Hold €1.2 Million in Your Hands?

With over 20 years of experience in luxury drinks and high-end brokerage, Ben Odgers has built and managed luxury retail empires, generating hundreds of millions in revenue. As a specialist in catering to the top 1% of spirits collectors, Ben has now launched Spirits Sourcery, a focused brokerage for rare wines and spirits, offering business intelligence and bespoke customer experiences.

So, you’ve sold two bottles of Macallan 1926. Could you tell me what that was like?

(Macallan 1926 is considered by many to be the rarest and most expensive bottle of whisky in the world.)

“That was the seminal moment of my career. Back in 2008, when we started Le Clos, we visited Macallan. This was before the new distillery was built—we literally walked into a broom cupboard. It was the fine and rare room, where every Macallan Fine and Rare  was kept, just tucked away in a little back room.

At Le Clos, we began seeing these bottles sell. We realized we had access to every reference except the 1926. So, we reached out to Macallan, but they’d already sold all the 1926s. We started looking elsewhere and eventually found a seller in the UK. He wanted £300,000 for the bottle.

At the time, that seemed like an enormous risk—the last bottle had sold for £70,000 in 2007. In hindsight, of course, we should’ve snapped it up.

Fast forward to 2018: I was sitting with a colleague and his wife, who was acting as our translator. We were communicating with a seller, and after asking what they wanted, a text came through: ‘the ’26.’ I knew immediately we had to get to work.

We located a seller in Italy with one  Peter Blake and one Valerio Adami labelled bottle. The price was agreed upon at €600,000 each. The bottles were shipped to Dubai.”

Did you get to hold them?

“Well, our plan was to display them in-store for a week before the buyer took possession. They arrived, and I had to pick them up to place them in the display. At one point, I was holding one bottle in each hand—€600,000 in each hand. I’ve never been so careful in my life.

Since we were at the airport, the buyers could take them onboard as hand luggage. We had two custom stainless steel flight cases made for safe transit. When the buyers came to collect the bottles, they signed the possession form, opened the display case, and…just put the bottles into their backpacks. €1.2 million in a pair of backpacks.”

Do people actually drink ultra-high-value bottles, or are they mainly for collectors?

“Through Spirits Sourcery, we have access to about 11 bottles of 1926. To give you an idea, the 1926 comes in several editions: the Peter Blake, Valerio Adami, Michael Dillon, the unlabelled, and the Fine and Rare bottles.

The Fine and Rare bottles are currently worth around €2.1 million, while the Peter Blake and Adami bottles are valued closer to €2.5 million. Even with market corrections, they’d still probably achieve these prices at auction.

That said, I know a very trusted source who told me three of the 12 Peter Blake bottles have been drunk. They tend to be collectors' items, but there are people who buy Macallan 30 for €4,000 a bottle as their ‘house whisky.’ They’ll order 100 bottles at a time, and those get drunk.”

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