A Port Ellen cask distilled on 15 February 1979 is up for sale at Fine Spirits Auction with an opening bid of one million euros, around £865,000. Bidding closes on 2 October 2026. The cask is being sold by Diageo through its Cask of Distinction programme.

What is on offer

This is cask number 1145, a refill American oak hogshead. Based on the June 2026 measurements the expected strength is 51.4% and the expected outturn around 73 bottles: at the opening price that works out at nearly 13,700 euros a bottle. The lot includes logistics, storage and bottling.

The cask sits in the warehouses at Royal Lochnagar, in the Highlands. Whoever wins it can bottle straight away or leave it to mature until 16 February 2029 and take it to a full fifty years. Charles MacLean calls it “as good a Port Ellen as I have ever tasted; unusually dark and rich, hugely complex and rewarding”.

Already sold in 2022

This same cask went to auction in 2022, selling for £875,000, around 1,018,000 euros at the rate of the time. Four years on the asking price is essentially the same, and in euros it is even slightly lower: the market for rare casks, then described as an investment on a permanent climb, has stalled, as we saw on bottle prices over the past year.

Port Ellen stopped distilling in May 1983 and reopened in 2024: the casks from the seventies and eighties are a closed number, and every bottling thins them out. That, more than the liquid, is what the money buys. When an official release lands at four figures, like the 42 year old put out for the distillery’s bicentenary, the price of a whole cask explains where that figure comes from.