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.

A Macallan 18 year old released in 2016, the first to state the year of bottling instead of the year of distillation. It is presented in the purple box used from 2006 to 2017. The first edition of Macallan 18 Year Old was released in 1984 (a 1965) when Macallan recovered its bottling license from Campbell, Hope & King, whose bottlings were generally aged for 15 years, despite this not being mentioned on the label.