Macallan 18 Year Old 1974 Original Box 700ml

An incredibly rare vintage 1974 18 years-old Macallan Sherry Wood Highland Single Malt Scotch Whisky, bottled without added coloring or chill filtration in the year 1992 as a 75cl bottling for the retail market at 43.0% vol. and now one of Macallan s particularly rare original bottlings from the early 1970s.
The 18-year-old Macallan Oloroso sherry oak matured Highland single malt scotch whisky is part of the series that gave Macallan its almost legendary reputation: the pure sherry cask bottlings. It was not until the mid-1960s that Macallan concentrated on sherry cask-matured single malts and was able to gain great recognition among whisky connoisseurs worldwide in a short space of time with its unusual cask policy. At that time, they experimented with different sherry casks and then decided to use European Oloroso casks, in which the world-famous Spanish liqueur wine had previously been seasoned. Despite the crisis in the 1980s among sherry producers, the Speyside distillery Macallan managed to secure a supply of selected sherry casks and to continue bottling the coveted sherry cask matured whiskies.

Today, the 18-year-old sherry-oak Macallan Single Malt is one of the world s best-known and most sought-after whiskies, enjoys an almost legendary reputation due to its excellent quality and the fact that it is bottled without coloring agents, and can certainly be described as an icon among Scotch whiskies. In 2004, respectively with the vintage 1986 bottling, Macallan changed the design and the packaging of the 18 years Sherry Oak, these bottles and packaging have a modern shape and were delivered with a shiny-purple box, from 1992 the bottlings were additionally marked with a security hologram on the capsule and an individual number in addition to the existing bottle code to protect against counterfeiting. In 2017, the vintage indication on the bottles was changed and the Macallan Sherry Oak Scotch Whisky now bears the indication of the year of bottling/release on the bottle label as well as on the packaging. Inspired by the Rare Cask series, Macallan then changed the design of the bottle in April 2018, presenting the distinctive v-shaped indentation worked into the glass at the transition to the bottleneck with optimized refill and counterfeit protection combined with an embossed box with a high-quality design.

In particular, the special sherry wood bottlings in the old design from the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s are almost impossible to find today and fetch exorbitant prices at Bonhams, Kruger and Christies auctions, with a further upward trend. The sherry oak vintage bottlings from the late 1980s and 1990s are now among the most sought-after bottlings and individual vintages are now true rarities!