Macallan is to Scottish single malts what Petrus is to French grand crus - a monument! To this day, no other distillery has sold a single edition at such a high auction price as The Macallan 60 Year Old 1926 Dillon, which fetched £1.2 million in 2018.Macallan owes this renown to the excellence of its production methods and its sherry-cask maturation, as well as the business acumen of its owners who, in the early 20th century, set out to conquer numerous markets, and the aptness of their vision of the distillery and its single malt, which they recognized as being akin to a château and grand cru. This led to the whisky adopting practices from the world of wine, including vintage bottlings for all versions aged 15 years and older, with the help up until the late 1960s of companies such as Campbell, Hope & King and Gordon & MacPhail, who bottled and distributed the malt on The Macallan's behalf. The 1990s saw the appearance of elegant 25 and 30 year olds, including those presented in the Tudor Crystal Decanters range, presaging the change in direction The Macallan would take in the new millennium. In 1999, an outstanding copper-adorned curved crystal decanter was released for a 50 Year Old edition distilled in 1949.

Launched between 2002 and 2003, the Macallan Replica series aimed to reproduce the style and appearance of Macallans from times gone-by. In the distillery’’s warehouses, the 1841, 1861, 1874 and 1876 were exactly recreated from very old bottles bought some years before. It was only after the new range was launched that investigations cast doubt over the authenticity of the allegedly 19th century bottlings Macallan had bought to produce the range, following which the collection created from counterfeit bottles was immediately removed from the distillery’’s shelves. And yet... the replicas were of such a high quality that they nonetheless became highly sought-after! This is the 1861 Replica, of which 17,000 bottles were released.