The Macallan Fine & Rare Collection

The Macallan Fine & Rare, one of the most collectable whisky series, is the distillery's series of vintage-dated bottlings, released under that name from 2002. The vintages run from 1926 to 2000, and the whiskies were bottled across seven decades — the earliest in 1962, the most recent in 2024. Most are single casks; whilst a few were bought back from private collections and re-bottled into the series.

Completing the full set is the difficulty. The 1926 ran to 40 bottles, with only 14 of them carrying the Fine & Rare label. The 1957 ran to only 15 bottles, the 1961 to 22, and the 1938 35YO to 48 — against 198 for the 1938 31YO. Several vintages exist in more than one cask, so two bottles sharing a year are not necessarily the same whisky.

The 1926, cask 263, has very much contributed to the series having a stellar reputation. The Valerio Adami bottling sold at Sotheby's in London on 18 November 2023 for £2,187,500 including premium — £1.75 million at the hammer — the most valuable bottle of whisky ever sold at auction. That cask gave 40 bottles: 14 under the Fine & Rare label, 12 with artwork by Peter Blake, 12 by Valerio Adami, and 2 left unlabelled (one hand-painted later by Michael Dillon).

Because the series is built cask by cask, the cask identifies a bottle more precisely than the year does. Where The Macallan publishes a cask number or an outturn, the listing gives it.