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Diciadain, 18/May/2011
Most Expensive Islay Whisky Ever?
Over the last couple of days a slightly Islay whisky related item kept popping up on Twitter, so this afternoon I decided to give in and write about it this evening. Since then the Bruichladdich Blog has also picked up on it, another reason to take a look. So what is this talk about the world's most expensive Islay whisky ($6.2 Million …) all about?
I think I first spotted it in an entry titled Isabella’s Islay - The world’s most expensive whisky at $6.2 million on a website called ‘BornRich’. Since then it keeps popping up in all kinds of luxury and ‘rich’ websites and blogs. And of course on Twitter.
$6,200,000.00 (or in short $6.2 million), that's £3,837,925.87 or €4,354,177.13 at this evening's exchange rates.
What do you get for this kind of money?
Well, as far as the whisky is concerned we don't really know. All it says is that is comes from Islay, that it is a single malt cask strength, that it is not chill filtered, that is has no additives or colouring and that it matured in casks for many years. Quite a few Islay single malt whiskies would fit that description. So we don't know if the whisky itself is really the most expensive whisky, it could really be any old whisky.
No, what makes it so expensive is the decanter it comes in. It comes in a (in my eyes rather tacky and tasteless looking, but that might just be me?) decanter covered in thousands of diamonds, hundreds of rubies and lots of gold. Sorry, no pictures, I don't want something like that on my blog. Does that make it the most expensive whisky? Not really, not in my eyes. Just the most expensive (possibly, I have no idea what else is out there) decanter.
Anyway, what I found rather interesting is that at least to me the whole impression I get isn't very trustworthy: The official website seems to be Isabella's Islay. A website with no contact address or phone number I could see, just an email address. A website that if you look closer is actually hosted at Moonfruit, a free website builder (try http://www.isabellasislay.moonfruit.com/)? They offer a $6.2m whisky but are too cheap to pay for hosting and a real individual website? Looking up the company I (same as the Bruichladdich Blog) noticed the company was only set up in December 2010. But that's not all: When looking up the address of the company I found that over 200 companies seemed to be located at that address. Which is no surprise, because it's a Mailbox address. May be I'm reading this all wrong, but it's not exactly somewhere I personally would spend £3.8m (if I had them)…
Oh, before I forget, what did Mark Reynier at the Bruichladdich blog think? Simple: ‘I just hope it is not our whisky in there.’
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