The Most Expensive Collection Of American Whiskey Broke Auction Records At $2.5 Million

Serving as the next data point indicating the rise of American whiskeys in the world of collectors, a recent auction held by Sotheby's smashed records as the most valuable single-owner American whiskey collection ever sold at auction. The pre-sale estimates for this whiskey collection started at around $1.17 million, but the final sale price more than doubled that figure, coming in at over $2.5 million. All 360 lots in the collection sold in the live auction — held January 24, 2026, in New York City — with 89% of the lots exceeding the high-end of their pre-auction estimates.

Interestingly, the buyers at this auction were not exactly the usual suspects, though neither was the auction itself. This was the first time that Sotheby's has held a live auction for a single-owner whiskey collection, doing so at the Breuer Building, the auctioneer's headquarters on Madison Avenue, and many of the clearly enthusiastic buyers fell outside the norm. Nearly all of the buyers at this auction were North American collectors, with around half of them under the age of 40 and one-third new to Sotheby's.

The success of the auction may have been due in part to the unique presentation of the collection. Sotheby's put together a pop-up bar in the auction house, allowing potential buyers an up-close view of the collection before the auction. With the staggering quality of the bottles on display, it is easy to understand how laying eyes on a particular prize could set the palate to wondering and steel the determination of would-be collectors.

The Great American Whiskey Collection, as the auction was dubbed, consisted of a wide variety of unique and hard-to-find bottles, some of which may be recognizable from other lists of the most expensive bottles of bourbon. Some highlights of the collection included bottles of Old Fitzgerald, Red Hook Rye, and a number of different Van Winkle offerings. The collection also included a number of pre-prohibition bottles, though none that could challenge for the title of the world's oldest bourbon.

The lot that fetched the highest price in the collection was a bottle of Old Rip Van Winkle 20 Year Old Single Barrel "Sam's" from 1982. Thought to now be the most expensive bottle of American whiskey ever sold at auction, this lot went for $162,500, or about 62.5% more than the high end of its pre-auction estimated value. Nearly every bottle of Van Winkle whiskey is known to be expensive, thanks to its combination of rarity and extreme popularity, but by all metrics, this sets a new benchmark for American whiskey collectors.

Surely one of the rarest American whiskeys, the auction also included two bottles of Very Very Old Fitzgerald "Blackhawk." What makes these bottles especially unique is that they are from a private bottling for the Wirtz family, the owners of the Chicago Blackhawks NHL team. These bottles were never made available for public sale, and two of the three bottlings of this extremely rare whiskey were featured in the collection, distilled in 1950 and 1951. These bottles sold for $112,500 and $60,000, respectively, both well above pre-auction estimates. If this auction makes anything clear, it is that American whiskey is taking a new place on the collectors' stage.