Want To Sample The World's Oldest Whiskies? Look To These Rival Brands

What's the oldest whisky you've ever tasted? Maybe there's a bottle of Lagavulin 16-year-old Scotch  in your cabinet if you're lucky. Serious whisky enthusiasts might have even taken sips of Last Drop's 40- to 55-year-old whiskys. But for the oldest whisky on the market today, look to the Gordon & MacPhail 85-year-old expression. This tipple was made from spirit from Glenlivet Distillery and housed over decades in a Gordon & MacPhail American oak sherry cask.

Eighty-five years is a long time for anything to sit still, but the whisky has done exactly that since February 3rd, 1940. That was when Gordon & MacPhail owners, George Urquhart and his father John, first filled Cask 336 at The Glenlivet Distillery. It's here that the whisky stayed, completely undisturbed, until February 5th, 2025 when it was finally deemed ready. The juice was taken out and bottled at 43.7% ABV, housed within a custom decanter designed by American architect Jeanne Gang shaped like a bottle intertwined in crystal tree branches, and dubbed Artistry in Oak. Only 125 decanters exist, and to snag one of these, the price is unsurprisingly steep: £125,000.

The record previously belonged to The Macallan's Time:Space, an 84-year-old release from 2024 marking the distillery's 200th anniversary — fittingly, only 200 were made. These bottles, too, were housed in ornate wooden containers. Both the Time:Space and the Gordon & MacPhail 85-year-old were filled into their casks in 1940, which makes the two whiskies more siblings than rivals. What separates them is a single year — Time:Space was opened first.

Gordon & MacPhail opened in 1895 as a grocer and a tea, wine, and spirit dealer in Elgin, Northeastern Scotland, in the Speyside whisky region, taking its name from James Gordon and John Alexander MacPhail. It would have stayed that way and perhaps never entered the history books if not for John Urquhart, hired soon after, becoming senior partner in 1915 and nudging the business toward whisky brokering. They bought new-make spirit from distilleries then matured it in-house — unlike most brokers at the time, who bought finished whiskies rather than raw spirit. The company has been privately owned by the Urquhart family all this time, and with no outside shareholders demanding an early return, casks rested as long as the family judged necessary. In the 85-year-old single malt's case, it was across four generations.

The Macallan took a different route. It has been distilling at its Speyside site since 1824 and the company draws its ultra-aged releases from its own stock. That's how Time:Space came to be, and The Reach, an 81-year-old Macallan bottled two years earlier (and previously the world's oldest whisky), followed the same logic.

That rivalry sits alongside a business relationship, though. Under its Speymalt label, Gordon & MacPhail has spent decades buying new-make spirit from The Macallan and maturing it in casks ordered specifically for that purpose — so the company chasing Macallan's record has also been one of its customers. However, in 2020, Gordon & MacPhail announced it would stop filling casks with spirit from distilleries it doesn't own, starting in 2024, to focus on its own Benromach and The Cairn distilleries. Existing stock will keep supplying independent bottlings for years to come, but the practice behind these record-setting releases is winding down.