The $107 “Macallan,” a $2.8 Million Macallan, and Does Barley Matter?

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Six bottles from across the pond this week, and half of them aren’t on a US shelf at all. Regulars know the drill. For anyone new: my last four-bottle order from The Whisky World came to about $400 shipped to Pennsylvania, against roughly $549 to assemble the same lineup here, when you could find the bottles at all. Bundle three or four and the shipping math works in your favor.

Bunnahabhain’s annual cask strength 12 is back. This year master blender Julieann Fernandez paired Oloroso sherry casks with bourbon casks and bottled it at 55.8%. Raisins, figs and dates up front, then honeyed vanilla, toasted coconut and the distillery’s coastal edge. The US release carries a $143.99 SRP; The Whisky World is about $40 under that.

ABV: 55.8% | Cask: Oloroso sherry + bourbon | 700ml

Price: ~$105 (£78.90)
Typical US Market Range: $143.99 SRP (just released; no settled street price yet)
Savings: ~$39

Who’s this for: The unpeated-Islay fan who wants the 12 with the volume turned up.

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Regulars know where I stand on Deanston. This is the second cask strength edition of its Virgin Oak, released for the distillery’s 60th anniversary. It was matured in ex-bourbon casks, then finished for up to a year in new American oak, and bottled at 60.7%, non-chill filtered with no added color. Vanilla fudge, toffee, baked apple and white pepper sit over that waxy Deanston core. The first cask strength batch launched in the US at $97.99.

ABV: 60.7% | Cask: Ex-bourbon, virgin American oak finish | 700ml

Price: ~$73 (£54.90)
Typical US Market Range: No US listing for this edition yet; the first batch launched at $97.99 SRP
Savings: ~$25 vs. the first batch’s US price

Who’s this for: Anyone who likes the standard Virgin Oak and wants it at full strength for under $75.

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Benromach’s new flagship, launched September 3, joins the 15 and 21 in its signature range. It’s matured exclusively in first-fill sherry casks and bottled at 46%, non-chill filtered. Expect fruitcake, raspberry and orange, cracked black pepper, and the distillery’s trademark wisp of smoke. Benromach also turns up in this week’s Worth Knowing.

ABV: 46% | Cask: First-fill sherry | 700ml

Price: ~$60 (£44.90)
Typical US Market Range: No US release announced; the 10 Year Old at 43% runs $49.99 at Total Wine
Savings: Access play. Not on US shelves yet.

Who’s this for: The Benromach 10 drinker who wants more sherry and more strength.

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The label says Speyside blended malt, but Lagmore is widely understood to be teaspooned Ballindalloch: a single malt with a drop of another whisky added so the source can’t be named. It spent at least 10 years in first-fill bourbon barrels before bottling at 48%, non-chill filtered, from Living Souls, the bottler behind the 99&1 we featured in July. Orchard fruit, tarte tatin and vanilla custard. Regulars know I work with Ballindalloch; this is an independent bottling, not one of theirs.

ABV: 48% | Cask: First-fill bourbon barrels | 700ml

Price: ~$73 (£54.90)
Typical US Market Range: $96.99 at Scotch Drinkers Only
Savings: ~$24

Who’s this for: Anyone who wants a bright, bourbon-cask Speysider with a good label puzzle attached.

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A single refill hogshead of Clynelish, distilled in 2015 and bottled by Decadent Drinks at the series’ usual 48.5%. Only 361 bottles. Refill wood keeps the cask in the background, so this is Clynelish showing itself: beeswax, mineral, lemon rind, honey and white pepper, with the waxy texture the distillery is known for.

ABV: 48.5% | Cask: Refill hogshead (single cask) | 700ml

Price: ~$87 (£64.90)
Typical US Market Range: Not available in the US
Savings: Access play. 361 bottles total.

Who’s this for: The drinker who wants to taste Clynelish’s spirit, not a cask’s makeup.

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Still on the shelf since we featured it September 24. Signatory won’t name the distillery, but an “(M)” from Speyside is widely understood to mean Macallan. Distilled in 2008, matured 18 years in first-fill Oloroso sherry butts, and bottled at 57.1% (100 UK proof), non-chill filtered and natural color.

ABV: 57.1% | Cask: First-fill Oloroso sherry butts | 700ml

Price: ~$107 (£79.90)
Typical US Market Range: Not available in the US; official Macallan 18 Sherry Oak runs $350–420 at 43%
Price gap: ~$245–315 vs. the official 18

Who’s this for: The sherry drinker who wants an 18-year-old “Macallan” at cask strength for under a third of the official price.

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Charlie isn’t a Macallan guy. But his wife, whose interest in whisky had faded, saw an Instagram ad promising an intensely coconut-forward dram and wanted to try it. He warned her it wouldn’t taste like that, then ordered it anyway: £140, no age statement, matured in sherry-seasoned American oak and ex-bourbon casks. Neither of them found much coconut. The nose is dominated by apple, with mango, pineapple, lemon, vanilla and marzipan. The palate opens bitter and woody before pastry, banana and liquorice, starting creamy and ending in a short, drying finish. It’s easy to sip and not a bad whisky, just simple. He’d value it at £60–70, and says a price-adjusted score would be a 4 at most. His wife pushed the bottle back across the table after a few sips.

Score: 5/10 (“Average. In a good way”)

Full Review Here

My take: This is the Macallan marketing machine we covered back in June: a flavor sold by an ad and priced well above what’s in the glass. If you want Macallan spirit, look at this week’s Bottles Worth Grabbing. The Signatory (M) 18 is widely understood to be Macallan, and it’s 18 years old, at cask strength, for less than the Harmony costs.

Bruichladdich is marking 25 years since its 2001 reopening with three anniversary bottlings. The Old Skool 10 wears a retro label inspired by the distillery’s 1980s bottles and is distilled from barley grown on Islay. It was matured in first-fill bourbon and first-fill Sauternes casks. On the nose Ruben found Bruichladdich’s typical semi-sweet melon fruit, gristy malt and mild coastal notes, plus apple, lemon, meadow flowers, clotted cream and fennel, with hay and a muddy edge in the background. The palate is oily, moving from orchard fruit to biscuit, white bread, lemon zest and grapefruit, then a chalky minerality with spearmint, almond and white pepper. The finish is medium to long, on peppery oak and salted pear. He calls it distillate-driven and more mineral than today’s fruit-and-vanilla whiskies: well made and full of character, but not essential if you already own other Bruichladdichs.

Score: 87/100

Full Review Here

My take: This one was in my last order from The Whisky World, and it ties straight into this week’s Worth Knowing. Bruichladdich is one of the few distilleries that tells you where its barley grew. Ruben’s “distillate-driven” verdict suggests the spirit is doing more of the talking than the casks.

Ardbeg’s new core-range 15 is matured in ex-bourbon, Oloroso sherry and new charred oak, and bottled at 48.8%, non-chill filtered with no added color. After the first pours of familiar Ardbeg peat, the nose opened into stone fruit, apricot, berries and cream, rich vanilla, honey and cigar box, with sea spray and only faint smoke. On the palate the smoke arrives as ash alongside vanilla, caramel and coconut, and the finish turns to Ardbeg’s citrus with minty, medicinal peat and some bitter oak. Water brings out lemon and sugar cookie but isn’t needed. He tasted it against two bottles at the same price, around $100–105. Uigeadail is darker, funkier and dominated by sherry. Lagavulin 16, at 43%, showed a sharp edge, and next to the Trudernish felt like going from black and white to color.

Score: 4.75 out of 5 glasses

Full Review Here

My take: We featured the Trudernish in September, and this backs it up. The Lagavulin 16 comparison is the one to note: I’ve knocked the 16’s 43% bottling before, and here it loses to a younger Ardbeg at the same price. A 15-year age statement, 48.8%, nothing added, around $100. That’s how a core range should look.

Back in April, we covered why barley gets malted: soak it, trick it into sprouting, kiln it, and borrow its enzymes. What we skipped is which barley. Whisky labels will tell you the cask, the age and the peat level, but almost never the grain. Ballindalloch is one of the rare exceptions: the single cask we featured October 1 was distilled from Concerto, before the distillery switched to Laureate.

The short answer is that variety matters, but less than the heritage-grain marketing suggests. And most of the reasons distillers pick one barley over another have nothing to do with flavor.

Modern barley is bred for yield, not taste. Distillers measure barley in liters of pure alcohol per tonne. Modern varieties clear 400, while Golden Promise, the workhorse of the 1970s, managed around 380. Historically, the gap in the field was wider still: modern varieties produced about three tonnes an acre against Golden Promise’s two, and Golden Promise carried roughly a 20% price premium. Across a large distillery, that math decides everything. It’s why Scotch has cycled from Golden Promise to Optic to Concerto, and now to Laureate and LG Diablo. Each new variety won its place on yield and disease resistance, not on what it did in the glass.

Golden Promise is the variety distillers still talk about. In the 1970s it made up as much as 90% of the UK’s malting barley, and Macallan famously used it for years, praising the full-bodied, oily spirit it produced. Today it’s a sliver of the crop, but some distilleries have kept blending it in. Glengoyne has paired it with Optic and credited it with adding weight and body to the new make. Benromach adopted the same approach in 1998. Notice the pattern: when distillers describe what older varieties do, they talk about texture far more than specific flavors. Dornoch’s team says the same of heritage barley generally: it makes an oilier, more textural spirit than Laureate does.

A controlled study suggests where barley grows matters more than what it is. A 2021 peer-reviewed study grew two barley varieties on two Irish farms over two seasons, then malted and distilled each crop under identical lab conditions. Variety, growing environment and season all changed the new make’s aroma, but the environment, and how each variety responded to it, mattered more than variety alone. The warmer, drier site produced toasted almond and an oily, biscuity spirit. The other ran lighter, more floral and fruity. Three caveats keep this honest. It measured new make, not aged whisky. The two varieties were close genetic relatives, which the authors note may have muted the variety effect. And the study was driven by Waterford, a distillery whose entire pitch was terroir: the same Waterford we covered being sold in April after the business behind that pitch collapsed.

Bere is the outlier, and it’s hard work. Bere has been grown in Scotland for centuries, and it’s a six-row barley. Modern malting barley is two-row: only one kernel forms at each point along the head, so the grains grow large and uniform. Six-row barley forms three at each point, packing more grains onto the plant but leaving them smaller and less even. Bere’s grains are also denser, with a husk hard enough to cause real trouble: Bruichladdich says it broke the distillery’s mash tun the first time they used it, and Arran says it clogged theirs. It costs more, too. In the mid-2000s, Arran’s bere malt ran about double the price of regular malt and yielded roughly 15% less spirit.

So why bother? Partly heritage: Campbeltown’s distillers ran on bere in the 1830s, when its malt was taxed about a fifth less than regular barley. Partly farming: it ripens about three weeks earlier than modern varieties and grows on poor soils where they won’t, which is why it survived on Orkney. And partly flavor, though here the evidence is the distillers’ own word. Bruichladdich calls it unctuous, sweet and well-rounded, and believes blind tasters could pick it out even after years in cask. Arran described its 10-year-old as full of oils with a rich, gristy-malty flavor. That’s the same texture story as Golden Promise, plus a heavier grain character. Distillers who use Bere are chasing character and a story, not efficiency.

Springbank’s Local Barley shows the trade-off up close. Springbank’s everyday barley comes mainly from the east of Scotland. Once a year, it malts a crop grown by a farmer near Campbeltown for its Local Barley series. The farm, variety, age and cask mix can all change from one release to the next. Belgravia from Glencraigs Farm, just outside town, has appeared more than once; the 2025 releases used Bere from two other Kintyre farms. The idea has deeper roots, too. Springbank’s 1965 and 1966 vintages, bottled decades later, were made with barley, peat, water and even the coal that fired the stills, almost all sourced within eight miles of the distillery.

The challenges start before the grain reaches the malting floor. A commercial maltster delivers barley clean and to spec. Local barley arrives as farmed, with irregular grain sizes plus stones and field debris to separate out. Bere is the hardest of all. Springbank says it is far more sensitive to water, so steeping stretches to about 56 hours against the standard 38, with longer rests to drain the grain and let it breathe. The smaller grains slow the mill too, so the team weighs batches at 30 kilograms instead of 40. Visiting reviewers say the staff are glad it only happens once a year.

What does all that effort buy? Springbank’s notes on the 2025 Bere 10-year-old turn savory: shiitake, soy and liquorice alongside fig and date. The 2024 Belgravia 13 leans thick, chewy and oily. Reviewers regularly say the Bere releases don’t taste like other Springbanks. But the cask mix, age and strength can also change between Local Barley releases, so the difference can’t be pinned on barley alone. It’s a showcase, not a controlled experiment. Springbank’s savory Bere is also a long way from Bruichladdich’s sweet, rounded one, which tells you the barley isn’t the only thing talking.

So does barley matter? Yes. Variety can shape both the aroma and the texture of new make. How much of that remains detectable after a decade in oak is a question nobody has answered well. For most bottles on your shelf, the grain was chosen for yield, and the cask is doing the heavy lifting. Where variety does show up, it’s at distilleries willing to pay for it in lost alcohol. When a label tells you which barley went in, it’s usually because using it cost them something. That makes it worth tasting, not proof that the barley is responsible for everything in the glass.

On October 9, Sotheby’s held its first auction at The Macallan Estate in Speyside. The headline lot, a Macallan 1926 with the Fine & Rare label, sold for £2,125,000 ($2,807,975). The sale marked the centenary of the whisky’s distillation. That price is a new auction record for a 1926 Fine & Rare bottle, up almost 50% in dollar terms from the previous record set in 2019.

The whisky almost never made it to bottle. In the early 1980s, Macallan was still a little-known blender’s malt when its marketing team came across an overlooked 1926 sherry cask and worried it had sat too long to be any good. It passed the nosing panel in 1986, and its 40 bottles became a marketing exercise to put Macallan on the map. A dozen were dressed by Sgt. Pepper artist Peter Blake, and a dozen more later by Italian painter Valerio Adami. Some of the remaining bottles were offered in 2003 for £20,000 apiece.

This bottle did not take the overall crown. That still belongs to one of its Adami siblings, which sold at Sotheby’s London on November 18, 2023 for £2,187,500 ($2,714,250), almost three times its low estimate.

My take: Read the headlines carefully. The new bottle is being billed as the most valuable whisky ever sold at auction in dollars, yet it’s only the second most valuable in sterling. Both are true. The gap comes down to exchange rates. In pounds, it came in about £62,500 under the Adami. In dollars, it beat it by about $94,000, because sterling is stronger against the dollar now than it was in November 2023. It also landed inside its £1.7–2.2 million pre-sale estimate, not nearly 3x over like the Adami.

That matters because the context around this sale is grim. Four days earlier, GlenWyvis, the world’s first community-owned distillery, entered administration. Production stopped, and all three of its staff lost their jobs. The very top of the market and the rest of the industry are running on different engines. Forty bottles from one cask, some with labels by celebrated artists, a century of history: this is closer to the art market than the whisky market.

So don’t take a $2.8 million sale as a sign whisky prices are healthy. It tells you buyers will still pay extraordinary sums for the rarest bottles with exceptional provenance. Everything below that tier is a different conversation, and one we’ll keep having in this newsletter.

That's it for this week.

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