‘Liquid Gold’: Dad Pays Off Debt With Old Bottles of Macallan Scotch Found in His Attic
A dad found some bottles of Macallan he purchased when his son was born and was able to clear off his credit card debt by reselling them. (Photo: Press Association via AP Images)
The Daily Record reported on Tuesday that a man from Glasgow, Scotland, was able to pay off a credit card bill by selling whisky he found in his attic.
The outlet reported that Graham Burns was “hit with a huge credit card bill in February 2019,” leaving him in a difficult financial situation. Fortunately, he remembered he had two rare bottles of whisky gathering dust in his attic — The Macallan 30 Year Old Sherry Cask Blue Box and a bottle of 18-year-old 1979 The Macallan Gran Reserva.
“When my son was born, I went to the Macallan distillery and bought a few bottles,” Burns explained, per the Daily Record. “I thought I’d keep them until his 21st birthday when he could have them, open them or sell them.”
Burns took them to a retailer, Old and Rare Whisky. The retailer appraised the old bottles and purchased them for £6,000 ($7,577).
When his wife approached him with the bill, he remembered the whiskies in the attic, which he claimed he had forgotten about for years.
“The whisky enabled me to pay off the credit card bills. I’m extremely happy, plus I have a handful of other bottles that the kids can have whenever they need them,” Burns said.
According to the Daily Record, John McIlvogue of Old and Rare Whisky believes that if you have an old bottle of unopened whisky, you may want to hold off on opening it.
“The term liquid gold has never been more true. People with high disposable income buy something and put it away, or drink it,” McIlvogue said, according to the Daily Record.
McIlvogue claimed that Macallan expressions from the late 1800s or early 1900s are particularly valuable, according to The Daily Record, and several accounts prove he is correct.
In November, a man found out a Macallan box (just the box, without the bottle of whisky in it) he had purchased for $250 ended up being worth $170,000.
The case previously held The Macallan 1926 60-Year-Old whisky, of which just 40 bottles exist in the world. An extremely rare 12 bottles were labeled with designs created by the Italian painter, Valerio Adami.
That same month, one of those “Adami bottles” went up for auction and sold for $2.7 million, at the time breaking the record for the most expensive wine or spirit ever to be sold at auction. That record was snapped in January by an Irish whiskey from The Craft Irish Whiskey Co. which sold for $2.8 million.
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