Hot on the heels of our fantastic Watches & Jewellery sale, Azca Auctions are proud to present our Wine and Spirits sale on the 28th of November. With 164 lots of Champagne, wine, and whisky (mostly whisky!), it features plenty of rarities and collectable bottles, as well as a small selection ready to drink now.
Some of the sale highlights include a blend of two vintage Macallans bottled for the wedding of Charles and Diana, a vertical collection of Dom Pérignon (all very drinkable!), rarely seen bottles of Springbank, Lagavulin, Littlemill, and Ardbeg, as well as various vintage bottlings from Cadenheads and Gordon & MacPhail. You’ll also find a handful of mixed cases in the lots—don’t skim over these without reading the descriptions, as there’s almost always a silver lining when I make a mixed bottle lot.
You can get all these bottles before Christmas, whether you’re looking to stock up your shelves or find the perfect present… even if that present is for yourself! This is one of those sales where I was dumbstruck when I saw the whisky collection, and I’m proud to bring you one of the most exceptional collections I’ve had the good fortune to find.
Don’t miss out—these bottles don’t come up every day. The full catalogue is now online on our website, and absentee bids can be left via the sale page. If you have any specific enquiries, please contact me at sam@azcaauctions.com.
Head of Wine and Spirits
William Grant built the Balvenie Distillery between 1892 and 1893, but it was originally used to provide whisky for the Grant’s Standfast blend, right up until 1973 when Balvenie began to be bottled as a single malt in its own right. The first few bottlings were in the traditional Grant’s bottle, designed by Hans Schleger – the same chap who designed the London Bus Stop logo (later used for most TfL logos in differing colour schemes) – which they were rightly proud of. It was only in the 1980s that they began to move Balvenie into its own unique bottle shape as the brand began to grow and take on a life of its own.
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Ardbeg is one of those rags-to-riches-to-rags-and-back-again stories. Its tumultuous past began with the fairly stable production of whisky used for blends. This was a big support for the local community on Islay, and it continued making a popular smoky component for blends for over 100 years (approx. 1815 to 1920). However, the blended market faltered after WWI, and the distillery shut and re-opened numerous times on its journey to becoming the prestigious single malt we know today.
It started to buy in peated malt from Port Ellen from 1974 onwards, which marked the end of the distillery’s self-sufficiency. This rare bottle of Ardbeg is from around 1980, one of the few early bottlings of traditional Ardbeg as a single malt under Hiram Walker's ownership. With the distillery being mothballed in 1981, none of the Port Ellen maltings were used prior to the distillery re-opening (intermittently) in 1989. It’s safe to assume this is one of the few examples of Ardbeg using all its own materials during its self-sufficient era.
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2002 is the vintage that was saved by a last-minute blast of heat. Having endured a cold winter and cool spring with downpours, and then a mild start to summer, hopes weren’t high. However, September and October warmed up and stayed warm. The right bank struggled more, and Merlot was particularly prone to poor flowering, meaning the harvest needed careful selection. Fortunately, Merlot is a small proportion of Lafite’s assemblage, and this is one of the best wines from the 2002 vintage, sitting squarely in the best part of its drinking window right now. Also, big bottles are scientifically proven to be more fun than smaller bottles – well, maybe not scientifically.
Originally imported by the Wine Society and stored in excellent conditions, this magnum has an excellent fill level, with a label in very good condition and perfect provenance.
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Despite some claiming the distillery couldn’t have been making whisky until 1816 when John P. Simpson took out a licence, it is a little unbelievable that after Simpson built the distillery in 1779, he didn’t run it for nearly 40 years while he left “Apply for distilling licence” on his to-do list. While the image of him taking off his flat cap at the end of a day minding his silent stills and empty malting floor, and cursing his bad memory for forgetting to apply for a licence for a 12,783rd consecutive day is amusing, I think we can assume that Bowmore has been operating since 1779. If you disagree, then this bottling merely celebrates the construction of the distillery (and its subsequent 37 years of laying fallow).
This bottling was released in 1979 to celebrate Bowmore’s 200th birthday. It’s made from whiskies distilled between 1950 and 1960 and matured in specially selected sherry casks. It still gets rave reviews and is widely considered to be one of the best bottles of Bowmore ever produced.
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