10 Vintage Whiskeys That Are Worth A Fortune Today

When it comes time to pick up a bottle of whiskey (or whisky), there are all kinds of options out there — especially in terms of price. Take Irish whiskey. There are a lot of severely underrated and outstanding Irish whiskeys that you can pick up at an affordable price point. On the other hand, we here at Tasting Table got the chance to sample Midleton Very Rare's Chapter Six in the Silent Distillery series, and you're talking about a $68,000-bottle. (Before you ask: No, it was just a sample; and yes, it's good to be a food writer.)

Given the price point and rarity of some of these bottles, it makes sense that there's a market for collecting. That's true of a lot of liquor- and alcohol-related things: Beer steins are incredibly popular as collectors' items, for example. But what about those bottles of whiskey that your older-generation family members have stashed in the back of a cabinet somewhere?

The bad news is that there are plenty of vintage whiskeys that aren't worth anything — and to be clear, we're talking about whiskeys that were bottled and released pre-2000. (And yes, this writer is going to have to go have a little lie-down after writing that.) In most cases, those vintage bottles can be cracked open and enjoyed without worrying about drinking away the price of a new car. But there are some bottles that are worth an absolutely ridiculous amount of money in the collectors' market. Let's talk about which whiskey bottles you might want to rethink drinking.

The chances of having one of these babies sitting in your liquor cabinet isn't zero, but it's pretty small: Way back in ye olde days of 1986, Macallan bottled 40 bottles of 60-year-old whisky with several different labels, then — so the story goes — gave most of them to its best customers. A bottle of The Macallan 1926 makes headlines when it goes to auction, and we're not talking new-car money, we're talking villa-in-the-Rocky-Mountains money ... and then some.

Twelve of the bottles had a label (pictured) designed by Peter Blake, whom music fans might know as one of the artists behind The Beatles' iconic "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album cover. In 2019, one bottle sold in Scotland for £615,063 (that's the equivalent of around $826,737), and the year prior, another bottle had sold in Hong Kong for £751,703 (or roughly $1,010,402). Wildly expensive? Hold our, er, whisky.

In 2023, another bottle went to auction. This was one of 12 that had a label designed by Italian pop art painter Valério Adami, and it sold for £2,187,500 — in other words, about $2,940,328. That set a world record, but it's not the only other bottle of this that's up there. There's one more artist who designed a label for this release, and that's Michael Dillon. Kind of. Dillion hand-painted a single bottle, and that sold for £1,200,000 in 2018 — or around $1,612,980 stateside.

Talking about the Peter Blake-, Valério Adami-, and Michael Dillion-illustrated bottles of The Macallan 1926, you'll notice that with 12 Blake labels, 12 Adami labels, and one Dillion illustration, there are still some of the 40 bottles of this particular whisky that are unaccounted for. They were labeled as The Macallan Fine & Rare 1926, and when those bottles go to auction, they, too, sell for an eye-watering amount.

Sotheby's auctioned a bottle in 2019, and although it was estimated to go for between £350,000 and £450,000 (which is around $470,453 to $604,868), it wildly outstripped that and ultimately sold for £1.5 million, or about $2,016,225. That actually broke the previously mentioned record set by the Michael Dillion-illustrated bottle, and that wasn't even the first time a Macallan 1926 set a world record: That happened back in a 1987 auction. 

So, what on earth makes collectors go for this as if it were water sourced from the Fountain of Youth and aged on Mount Olympus? Rarity? All 40 bottles came from a Spanish oak cask that had once aged sherry, was filled with whisky in 1926, and then sort of forgotten about. It was bottled shortly after being found at Macallan, and shockingly, the Adami bottle sold in 2023 was reconditioned and a one-milliliter sample was taken before sale. The whisky was reported to have pretty much every flavor note you could expect to hear when discussing whisky, and that sample will help authenticate bottles of The Macallan 1926 in the future.

In 2019, the whisky world was all in a tizzy when it was announced that a so-called "perfect" whisky collection was headed to auction. The 3,900 bottles belonged to an American collector, and one of the (many) spotlighted bottles was a Glenfiddich 1936 Peter J. Russell. It was estimated to sell for a few thousand pounds, and when one bottle sold at an auction in 2020, the final price was a much higher $16,452. 

Other bottles of Glenfiddich have sold for more, but for the purposes of our conversation about vintage bottles, this is one of the big ones. It was released in 1969, and the date and the name are significant.

Glenfiddich's bottling was done for Peter J. Russell & Co. Ltd., and Russell is an inductee into the Hall of Fame of Whisky. In 1936, his father founded Scotch Whisky Brokers — hence, the date on this bottle — but it's the younger Russell who's a pretty fascinating and influential person in the industry. When British stores started sourcing and selling private-label whisky, he's the one who hopped on board with a trend that's now incredibly familiar. Russell helped supply private-label brands in the early days, so the next time you crack open a bottle of your favorite Kirkland whiskey (or whisky), maybe raise a glass to him.

There are a lot of bottles from Springbank that are incredibly collectible, partially because it's such a small-scale distillery that typically bottles its whisky at a higher proof. If you're lucky enough to find anything that says it was bottled in the 1980s, you might want to get it appraised before opening it. There are a lot of individual bottles we could talk about, but let's talk about the 50-year-old bottle, because when you put things in perspective, it's strange stuff.

That 50-year-old age statement refers to the age it was bottled at, and this was actually distilled in 1919. (And yes, that means it pre-dates Prohibition, and it's a rare single malt from a time when blending was the go-to method of whisky production.) It's also a great example of how the world of whisky collecting can get very complicated very quickly, because you'll see two different versions of this up for sale. 

Springbank bottled it first in 1970 (pictured), and then a decade-ish later, rebottled leftover stock into 24 "new" bottles. Today, any bottles that go up for sale could be expected to go for around $13,000 (and to be clear, these are all estimated prices based on past sales in a variable market), or around $170,000. Which end of that you're on depends on the bottling — and the 1980s-era rebottling is the more expensive one.

Good news! At the time of this writing, there are bottles of these available from various online sellers. Picking one up will mean shelling out around $37,000 — give or take — but considering this was first bottled in 1991 and has a pretty neat story to it, we'll say that's not too bad? There were only 500 bottles of Glenfiddich's 50 Year Old First Edition. As for the story, William Grant was born in 1839, and in 1886, he bought some old distilling equipment from a nearby plant, then built the Glenfiddich distillery. His children helped with the construction — literally hauling the stones themselves — and in the 1930s, nine casks were filled for each of the nine children. They were combined in 1990, and when they were bottled in 1991, the bottles were signed by Grant's great-grandson. 

To be fair, that price isn't just for the bottle of this single malt. There's a presentation box that goes along with it, and — in theory — there should also be a certificate of authenticity, too. The bottles are also numbered, and they come with a pretty neat bit of history, too.

Bowmore is a little unique, in that it's both incredibly old and decently new ... but, because time has no meaning anymore, its 1990s origin story is still considered vintage. The Scottish distillery itself has been around since 1779, and it's been sold, resold, and sold again a few times. In the late 1980s and early '90s, things changed in a big way under Japan's Suntory Group — and that included the introduction of Black Bowmore.

Black Bowmore 1964 is named for the year that the contents of its bottles were transferred into sherry casks and left to age. When it was bottled in 1993, it was a huge deal: Marketing single malts was still a fairly new idea, the color imparted by the sherry casks was outstanding, and the distillery itself was known for having a unique microclimate perfect for aging. The 2,000-bottle run kicked off the development of a centuries-old brand into an ultra-collectible one, so it makes sense that it's a pricy one.

At the time of this writing, we found a few places selling the first edition, with prices ranging from around $33,000 to $55,750 per bottle. Those places note that, unsurprisingly, this bottle is getting more and more rare as the years go on. So, it's safe to say that prices will likely continue to climb — especially given how collectible the brand has become.

If you happen to stumble across a bottle of Midleton Very Rare, for the love of all that's holy, research it before you crack open that bottle and start mixing up some Irish coffees. Technically-speaking, Midleton considers its Vintage Collection to be bottles from between 1984 and 2023, and looking at the estimated prices for each year is enough to have you adding this to your list of things to pick up if you happen to travel back in time.

You'll see these Irish whiskeys sold in lots fairly often, and for an idea of more recent pricing, a lot of bottles from 2011 to 2022 sold for about $7,200 when 2022 was still a new release. But we're talking vintage, and as a side note, we can talk about this line at all thanks to Midleton's Barry Crockett. He was behind the first release in 1984, and at the time, he started setting aside 100 casks per year, just in case it was a hit. It was, and it's the 1988 bottle that's the record-setter. One bottle of that sold for $36,386 in 2021, and prices today sit at around $32,000 a bottle. 

Not all years are as valuable, however, and MVR has been released in different quantities that make some years more valuable than others. Even the more affordable years in the vintage bracket can hover around a few thousand bucks a bottle: 1991, for example, averages at around $2,000 a bottle, at the time of this writing.

In 2007, the oldest known bottle of Bowmore whisky went up for auction, and hilariously, the privately-owned bottle sold for so much that the distillery itself decided that the going price was too high. In an interview with BBC News, Bowmore's director at the time, Glen Moore, explained, "We'd known about the sale of the Mutter bottle for some time and had our heart set on bringing it back to its true spiritual home. We bid beyond the value limit we had set for ourselves, but unfortunately, the winning bidder went beyond that. There are some serious whisky collectors around the world."

Bowmore's limit was £20,000, and the bottle finally sold for £29,400 — which, accounting for inflation, is about $67,140 in today's money. More surprising than the fact that the bottle had some issues — for example, the cork had dropped into it — was the fact that there was some debate as to exactly what it was.

When the bottle went to auction, it was described as being a hand-blown bottle dating back to an 1850 whisky bottling for W&J Mutter. However, some experts say that the bottle shows signs of having been machined, and that — along with details on the label — suggest it dates to somewhere more around the 1890 mark. Interestingly, the bottle seems to have dropped off the face of the earth (figuratively speaking) since the auction, so things remain uncertain.

Anyone who knows anything about bourbon and whiskey has probably asked themselves at some point: Why is Pappy Van Winkle so expensive? It's a long and complicated story with a recent history that can best be summed up by the laws of supply and demand, but there's quite a bit of mystique around the brand, too. That said, if you find a bottle, you might want to do your research on it before you open it.

Prices are kind of all over the place, so let's just talk about one of the most expensive examples. The featured image is Pappy Van Winkle's 20 Year Old, bottled in the 1990s in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky. The age statement and bottling date is important: You'll find these particular bottles go for around $11,000, and you might occasionally find it for a grand or so less. More recent releases are more affordable (if that's an acceptable word to use), with the 2023-'24 edition going for around $2,500. 

It kind of makes sense: That '90s-era, 20-year-old bottle is what's largely credited for kick-starting Pappy's popularity. That popularity has led to some record-setting prices, including one 2025 auction that we'd feel remiss in not mentioning. That's when a 2007 bottle of Pappy sold for $125,000, and to be fair, it was an ultra-rare Van Winkle Selection bottled specifically for a charity auction.

So, this one takes just a little bit of background explanation, and it starts with just how many bottles typically come from a cask of whiskey (or whisky). That depends on things like how long it's been aging and how much of the liquid has been lost to the angel's share, but in most typical cases, you can expect between 200 and 300 bottles per barrel. When Glenfiddich's 1937 was bottled in 2001, there were just 61 bottles that came out of the cask that had been aging for 64 years and through the terms of 10 different warehouse managers. 

A 64-year-old whisky is pretty unprecedented, but the idea is that whatever was going on inside cask 843, it resulted in an extra-slow maturation process that allied for the creation of the distillery's oldest whisky. When Sotheby's had a bottle go to auction in 2025, it was estimated to sell for between $35,000 and $50,500, which is a lot. But compared to what we're going to tell you next, that's practically reasonable.

At the time of this writing, we found one for sale on a retail site in the UK. The price? A whopping £145,000 — or $194,902. Other sources confirm that, yes, the price of this whisky has continued to skyrocket, and given the rarity, that's not surprising. If you find one stashed in your parents' special liquor cabinet? It's practically better than winning the lottery.