Would you pay £1 million for a bottle of whisky?

Standing at an incredible 5ft 11 inches tall and with enough whisky to fill 444 standard bottles, the recent sale of a 32-year-old, 311-litre bottle of Macallan single malt at auction has hit headlines after selling for more than £1 million.

Confirmed by Guinness as the world’s largest bottle of whisky, the not so ‘wee dram’, called The Intrepid, was purchased by an anonymous foreign buyer at Edinburgh-based auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull.

The big bottle received bids from all over the world, but a final price of £1.1 million was reached – equivalent to almost £92 per standard serving.

The whisky was the brainchild of Daniel Monk, of Fah Mai and Rosewin Holdings, who claims the gargantuan bottle had ‘always been about more than money’.

He said: “This is a passion project to celebrate the life of my late father, Captain Stanley Monk, who was himself an explorer and achieved many amazing things during his life.

“Today would have been his birthday so it was a perfect date to put The Intrepid up for auction.”

The label on the bottle pays tribute to the achievements of 11 of the world’s pioneering explorers and includes images of Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Jamie Ramsay and Karen Darke.

A percentage of the sale will be used to support the various explorers’ chosen environmental, physical and mental well-being charities, including Marie Curie and the Campaign Against Living Miserably.

But how does it taste? According to Charles MacLean, one of Scotland’s leading whisky experts and Master of the Quaich the Scotch is an ‘an elegant whisky, with subtle complexity’.

The whisky for the bottle was taken from two sister casks in Macallan’s Speyside warehouse, where they had been sat for 32 years.

They were then bottled last year by Duncan Taylor Scotch Whisky – one of the leading independent whisky bottling companies.

Gavin Strang, managing director of Lyon & Turnbull, said: “It certainly isn’t every day you get to auction a bottle of high-quality, single malt, that also happens to be a record breaker.”