The Distillers One of One Auction 2025
The Distillers One of One Auction 2025
Worshipful Company of Distillers
The Distillers One of One Auction 2025
Founded by the Worshipful Company of Distillers (the Distillers Guild), the One of One is a biennial event at which distillery owners and whisky makers pull out their very best things, and auction them for charity (specifically the Youth Action Fund, which helps disadvantaged young people make progress with their lives.)
The auction has some good rules. Firstly whatever you enter, be it a bottle, decanter or entire cask of whisky, must be a true one of one. It cannot have a duplicate, cannot have appeared before, and cannot appear again.
Secondly, it’s 100% charitable giving. Sotheby’s charge a reduced fee for running the auction, which is covered in the buyer’s premium, but beyond that, the entire hammer price goes to the charity. The donors receive nothing to cover their costs in creating the lots, and all the money goes directly to the Youth Action Fund.
Right: Hopetoun House, where the auction will take place on the 10th October.
Why Shakespeare?
We are about a third of the way through releasing the Macbeth Collection (two acts so far, out of five total) and thought it would be nice to create a release that would sit alongside it, without being part of the collection itself. Shakespeare was the obvious choice, as he wrote the play but does not appear in it.
Why Mortlach?
For someone of such cultural importance, we know remarkably little about what Shakespeare was like as a person, so any assumptions on that front would likely be wrong. We decided to simplify it down to a couple of universal truths.
Shakespeare is very good (the whisky needs to be very high quality).
Shakespeare has remained good for a very long time (the whisky needs to be very old).
It may seem basic, but I think it’s a fair summation of what makes Shakespeare so extraordinary. Even after 400 years, his work is still relevant, the quality unsurpassed. So we needed a very good, very old whisky, which narrowed the number of options considerably… There aren’t many distilleries making spirit that can hold on that long. But Mortlach is built for this kind of ageing. Affectionately known as the Beast of Dufftown (a nickname created by Dave Broom) Mortlach has a fiendishly complex distillation process, that produces one of the heaviest, meatiest spirits in Scotland. It’s weighty, like Shakespeare is weighty. And they run it all through a little still they call Wee Witchie; perfect for the man who wrote Macbeth.
What about the illustration?
Quentin Blake has generously created a new illustration of Shakespeare and donated it to the auction, with the signed, original drawing included in the sale. Unlike the birds that characterise his illustrations for Macbeth, Shakespeare is drawn as a human, as he stands outside the collection. The drawing is presented in a folio within the presentation case, and represents a rare opportunity for the buyer, as although Quentin will produce works for sale, he very rarely sells published drawings - preferring to keep them for his archive. The drawing has been reproduced only once, on the bottle label itself.
The auction lots
Where can I see the the auction lots?
There will be an auction lot preview at Sotheby’s Bond Street, London from the 19th to the 30th September. The gallery will be open from 9am to 4.30pm on weekdays and 12-5pm on weekends.
When and where is the auction?
The auction takes place on Friday 10th October at Hopetoun House, near Edinburgh. There is an auction preview on the evening of the 9th October.You can register to bid via Sotheby’s here
And read more about the Distillers One of One here