CASKS, MALTS AND CASTLES

In search of rare whisky casks on a sporting excursion to the Scottish Highlands

- JARED PAUL STERN

The spirits world was stupefied last summer when an anonymous buyer from Asia paid around $19 million for an incredibly rare cask of Ardbeg single malt distilled in 1975.

The nearly-50-year-old whisky is the oldest liquid the cult Islay brand has ever released; but the price of the lone cask is more than double what Ardbeg's owner, the Glenmorangie Co., paid for the entire distillery including all its stock in 1997, as the Financial Times pointed out. It also smashed the previous record for a single cask by several million dollars.

Do the math though and the buyer is actually getting a pretty good deal. With bottles of 50-year-old single malts from distilleries of similar repute routinely fetching around $50,000-or even more if they are in bespoke decanters such as the ones produced by The Macallan and Bowmore-on the rare occasions they are available.

The 1975 Ardbeg cask's per-bottle breakdown comes to around $45,000, as it will yield around 440 bottles in all. Many of those could be worth even more in the years ahead, especially as only 88 bottles will be filled each year, with the remaining whisky continuing to age in the cask.

So the most well-heeled whisky collectors around the world aren't so much scratching their heads at the "astronomical" price, but trying to figure out how to get hold of an ultra-rare cask of their own. Top industry authorities the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States (DISCUS) and the Scotch Whisky Association (SWA) estimate that there are some 22 million casks maturing in warehouses in Scotland at its more than 140 Scotch whisky distilleries, "waiting to be discovered"-an astonishing figure, and worth many billions of dollars, though of course only a small number of these are in the same league as the Ardbeg 75. And in the wake of that sale, finding them is now going to instigate quests on the order of Indiana Jones.