Rare whiskey hits record $ 1.1 million in auction

A very rare bottle of Scotch whiskey brought in $ 1.1 million in a recent auction, a world record.

An anonymous bidder paid the record price for a bottle of The Macallan Valerio Adami 1926. The whiskey, bottled in 1986 after 60 years of aging, has never been opened.

Bonhams, an auction house, said the bottle sold for 848,750 pounds sterling, just over $ 1.1 million, at a sale in Scotland this week. The total selling price included a buyer premium of about $ 192,600.

It surpassed the previous world record set earlier this year by another bottle of the same whiskey, worth £ 814,081 or around $ 1.06 million.

"It's a great honor to have set a new world record, and particularly exciting to do so here in Scotland, a country of whiskey," said Martin Green, whiskey specialist at Bonhams in Edinburgh.

The spokesman for Bonhams, quoted by the New York Times, said the buyer was from Asia and had launched the winning bid call over the phone.

A Scottish distillery, Macallan, has commissioned pop artists Valerio Adami and Peter Blake to design labels for a limited 24 bottles, with each artist creating labels for 12 bottles, according to Bonhams. Experts do not know how many Adami bottles still exist. One bottle would have been destroyed during an earthquake in Japan in 2011, while another would have been opened and consumed.