Whisky News: 9 October 2026
This week served up three very different whisky stories: a 100-year-old bottle heading to auction at the estate where it was made, a cubesat heading to orbit carrying Scotch, and two English distillers taking on the government over what "single malt" can legally mean. Here is what happened.
The Macallan 1926 Goes Under the Hammer — at Home
Today, Sotheby's holds its first ever auction at The Macallan Estate in Speyside. The headline lot is a bottle of The Macallan Fine and Rare 60 Years Old 1926 — whisky distilled a century ago this year and drawn from cask number 263 in 1986 after 60 years of maturation. Sotheby's estimates it will fetch between £1.7 million and £2.2 million.
Only 14 Fine and Rare examples were ever bottled from that single cask. Twelve received labels painted by Sir Peter Blake, another 12 featured designs by Valerio Adami, and two were left unlabelled — one of which Irish artist Michael Dillon later hand-painted. No bottle from the cask had appeared at auction since an Adami-labelled example set the whisky auction world record at Sotheby's London in 2023.
What makes today's sale different is the location. For the first time, a bottle is returning to Speyside to be sold at the estate where the whisky was made. Jonny Fowle, global head of whisky at Sotheby's, called it "a landmark moment for the world of whisky collecting." Jaume Ferras, creative director at The Macallan, described hosting the auction as "a very special milestone."
Alongside the 1926, the sale includes The Macallan The Reach 81 Years Old (distilled in 1940, estimated at £90,000 to £140,000), a complete Macallan in Lalique Six Pillars Collection, and a Romantica three-bottle set created specifically for the auction at 42.6% ABV.
For collectors, the 1926 centenary auction is a notable moment. For everyone else, it is another illustration of how wide the gap has grown between the top end of the whisky market and the rest of the industry — a theme that has run through a difficult week for Scotch, following the GlenWyvis administration news earlier this week.
Scotland and Japan Are Sending Whisky Into Space
Engineers from the University of Glasgow and Japan's Kyushu Institute of Technology have announced a project to study how whisky ages in space. The plan is to launch a small cubesat in 2028 on a SpaceX supply mission to the International Space Station, deploy it into orbit from the station's Japanese module, and let it run for five years.
The satellite — nicknamed "Space Puffin" — will carry 10ml of fluid alongside a fragment of whisky cask wood. A nanophotonic sensor developed at Glasgow will monitor changes in the sample's chemical composition throughout the mission. The cubesat orbits Earth every 90 minutes, cycling through temperatures that swing between minus 150 degrees and plus 200 degrees Celsius, which the researchers believe could accelerate the maturation process in ways that are not possible on the ground.
Project lead Dr Gilles Bailet, from Glasgow's James Watt School of Engineering, said: "We want to see what the effect of a space environment is on the aging of the whisky. We've got the best people here in Scotland to be able to inform that, with centuries of experience."
Whisky has previously been sent to the International Space Station, but always within the temperature-controlled environment of the station itself. This is the first time Scotch would be exposed to the open conditions of orbit. The project is also designed to produce insights into pharmaceutical manufacturing in space: ethanol is a key building block in drug production, and the experiment aims to show how it could be extracted in microgravity.
Seven Glasgow engineering students have already visited Kyushu to work on the cubesat's battery, radio and onboard computers. The collaboration was made possible by a grant from Scottish distillery-design consultancy Allen Associates. Whether the eventual whisky is drinkable — or affordable — is another question entirely.
English Distillers Challenge the New Whisky GI Over Copper Stills
Two English distilleries have formally appealed the UK government's new geographical indication for English whisky, introduced by Defra on 11 September 2026. The dispute turns on a single word: copper.
Spirit of Birmingham and Circumstance Distillery in Bristol are not opposed to the English whisky GI itself. Their objection is to a clause in the product specification for single malt English whisky that requires "sufficient copper contact in the vapour path" during distillation. For Spirit of Birmingham, that rules them out entirely. The distillery uses a stainless-steel pot still with no copper components, which means it cannot legally call its product "single malt English whisky" under the new rules.
Anthony Dillon, founder and distiller at Spirit of Birmingham, said the specification was "too limited" and not "future facing." He argued that copper is a catalyst in distillation reactions, not an essential requirement, and that his process achieves the same outcomes through different means. "We use English heritage barley, English oak, have two sellout releases and yet we can't use the word 'English' for our single malt," he said.
Defra's position is that Spirit of Birmingham can still use the labels "English whisky" or "single malt whisky" — just not the combined designation "single malt English whisky." The English Whisky Guild, which drafted the GI and represents 50 distilleries, welcomed the regulations and noted that the copper requirement had already been loosened during consultation from an earlier proposal requiring 100% copper pot stills.
The appeals are ongoing. The debate goes to the heart of what a geographical indication is for: protecting an established regional style, or accommodating the diversity of what a growing industry produces. English whisky is only a few decades old as a category. How tightly it should define itself this early is a question the industry is still working out.
Sources
From the Clan Store
Three very different stories this week, but all of them rooted in Scotland. If the news has you reaching for a dram and something to wear, the Scotland Collection has you covered.
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