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.

Donated by Gordon & MacPhail
Gordon & MacPhail has enjoyed a special relationship with the Macallan distillery for many years. The renowned bottler even played a key role in Macallan’’s survival in the 1930s and 1940s, regularly buying its stocks and in the process gaining access to some remarkable casks over the years. Indeed, up until the 1970s, Gordon & MacPhail (alongside Campbell & Hope) was one of the distillery’’s only official bottlers.
In 1998, this history led to the creation of the Speymalt range which, through various vintages, demonstrates the breadth and complexity of the single malts from one of the world’’s best-known distilleries. This exceptional Speyside malt distilled at Macallan in 1950 and matured in a sherry cask in Gordon & MacPhail’’s cellars was bottled in 2006.