We’ve covered plenty of rare whiskey auctions before from big names like Sotheby’s, Bonhams, and Christie’s. But a relative newcomer to the auction world, Unicorn, has had some impressive American whiskey lots for sale as well in recent years, and the latest includes some rare Buffalo Trace Distillery brands worth checking out.
Scotch whiskey brands and distilleries like the Macallan get all the glory when it comes to the auction world, as evidenced by last year’s bottle of the Macallan 1926 60-year-old single malt that sold for a record-breaking $2.7 million. But the American whiskey world has its fair share of highly coveted unicorns, particularly when it comes to one name: Buffalo Trace. This Kentucky distillery is the home of brands like Pappy Van Winkle (made there in partnership with the Van Winkle family), W.L. Weller, E.H. Taylor, and the Buffalo Trace Antique Collection.
Recently, Unicorn actually set a couple of records for American whiskey sales, which are impressive even if they don’t come close to the scale of that bottle of Macallan. In May, a bottle of Very Very Old Fitzgerald 18 Year “Blackhawk” 121 proof bourbon sold for over 100 grand, and then that record was beaten a few weeks later by the sale of a six-liter bottle of Buffalo Trace Old Fashioned Copper 1982 bourbon for nearly $123,000. There’s no way to tell if anything available for auction now will reach those lofty heights, but the lineup is one that whiskey collectors should keep an eye on.
“Our June No Reserves auction is the perfect representation of what you’ll find on Unicorn every week and why our customers love our platform, whether you’re looking for an ultra-rare collector bottle or an everyday $20 sipper,” said said CEO and cofounder Phil Mikhaylov in a statement. Some of the highlights include a bevy of Buffalo Trace labels, like a bottle of Very Very Old Fitzgerald 12 Year bourbon from 1968, a true dusty that was distilled in 1956 and bottled in 1968 and contains whiskey produced at the long-gone Stitzel-Weller distillery. If you’re looking for Pappy, there’s a bottle of the 23-year-old from 2008 available that is estimated to fetch between $3,000 and $4,000. A more recent expression is last year’s Daniel Weller Emmer Wheat Recipe bourbon, a line extension of the W.L. Weller brand that was made from a mashbill using an ancient Egyptian wheat varietal. And this year’s Buffalo Trace Prohibition Whiskey Collection is available as an entire set, a throwback series meant to evoke the days when the distillery had a license to produce medicinal whiskey.
It’s not just Buffalo Trace whiskey, of course. Other bottles of note include an oddity of a dusty, the Old Forester Sputnik Bottled-in-Bond Decanter, a four-year-old bourbon from 1956 that comes in bottle that looks like it came from a Vault from the show Fallout. And it just wouldn’t be a whiskey auction without at least some Macallan—on offer here are The Macallan 22 Year Fine & Rare 1990 from 2013 and The Macallan M from 2015.
Overall, there are more than 3,400 lots to choose from, so there’s likely something that will wet your whistle. This auction ends on June 23 at 7pm, so head on over to the Unicorn website now to browse the whiskeys (and other spirits) and place a bid if you find something that you like.
