June Auction Highlights 2025
Welcome to our June 2025 Whisky-Online Auction highlights blog! We’ve got a selection of truly amazing old single malts for you this month from the likes of Karuizawa, Rosebank, Balvenie, and Longmorn, so we’d best get cracking.
Distillery Bottlings
We’ve got some wonderful old and/or long-aged official bottlings of single malt from some of Scotland's very greatest distilleries coming up for grabs in this month’s auction. Highlights include an exceptional small batch Glenfiddich Rare Collection 40-year-old Speyside single malt whisky bottled early in 2008, one of a limited edition of just 600 bottles from a handful of exceptionally high quality casks filled no later than January 1968.
The casks for this vatting of Glenfiddich 40-year-old were selected by Peter Grant Gordon, the great great grandson of Glenfiddich’s founder William Grant, and bottled at their natural strength of 45.4%. This fifth edition of Glenfiddich Rare Collection 40-year-old was dedicated to the whisky writer Michael Jackson, who had written the tasting notes for the previous four editions of this whisky but had passed away the previous summer, with Dave Broom stepping up to write some evocative tasting notes in tribute to his departed friend.
Staying with the OB 40-year-olds, we have another gem from the same era: a superb Highland Park 40-year-old Island single malt whisky bottled in 2008 early in the distillery’s relaunched Norse packaging days at a very hearty strength of 48.3%, with the poky strength carrying the classic late-1960s Highland Park spirit along a fascinating, complex flavour journey.
These spicy, oily, turfy Island single malt whiskies from Highland Park’s legendary late-1960s period still carry enough distillate character to shine through four decades of maturation and are a testament to careful cask selection but above all to the skills of the distillers of the day.
We also have a beautiful old bottle of Jameson 7-year-old Irish whiskey, also known as Jameson 3-Star. This whiskey was released in the 1950s, so would have been direct-fired pure pot still whiskey distilled at Jameson's old Bow Street distillery in the early 1950s or late 1940s in the immediate postwar era. These 7-year-old Dublin Whiskeys from Jameson were considered long-matured in their day and at their finest are spicy, waxy, oily, cereally, farmy, citrussy, coppery masterpieces, though batch variation and decades of bottle ageing mean that bottle variation is inevitable.
Elsewhere, another notable old bottling that doesn’t come up often these days is the famous Glenlivet 1967 33-year-old, which appeared in 2000 as the first bottling in Glenlivet’s iconic Cellar Collection series. Glenlivet 1967’s archetypal Speyside single malt character is carried deftly by the whisky’s 46% strength, and the simple label’s hand-written style belies a long-aged Glenlivet of mouth-watering elegance, intricacy and depth.
Finally for this section we have another glorious old Speyside. A legendary Balvenie released back in 2011, Balvenie Tun 1401 Batch 2 was the first widely available edition in the famous Tun series and caused a sensation in the whisky world.
Assembled from seven bourbon casks filled between 1967-1989 combined with three sherry butts from early 1970s vintages, Balvenie Tun 1401 Batch 2 was a limited edition of 2226 bottles at a natural cask strength of 50.6% and sold out almost instantaneously. This Balvenie’s bottomlessly complex fruity and spicy nose and eye-poppingly intense but deliciously well-balanced palate is a testament to Malt Master David C. Stewart’s superb cask selection and marrying prowess.
The Tun 1401 range was a series of limited edition bottlings from Balvenie named after Mr Stewart’s favourite marrying tun. Nine Balvenie Tun 1401 bottlings appeared between 2010-2013, with the first edition being a distillery-only bottling of just 336 bottles, while the second and third batches (for European / Asian markets and the USA respectively) are widely regarded as the best of the bunch.
There's many more superb Official Bottlings in this month's sale, including some outstanding drams from the likes of Aberlour, Ardbeg, Dalmore and Glenfarclas.
Independent Bottlings
As ever, there are some truly wonderful old Independent Bottlings in this month's whisky sale. We’ll start with a fabulous old Longmorn 1960 vintage 25-year-old small batch Speyside single malt whisky bottled in the mid-1980s by Gordon & MacPhail for their Connoisseurs Choice series in the old brown label presentation of the day.
These glorious old early vintage Longmorns from Gordon & MacPhail never fail to delight, with the stellar quality of the spirit shining brightly and giving fantastic fruit, oily, chewy malt and bakery flavours despite the low bottling strength of the Connoisseurs Choice bottlings. This Connoisseurs Choice version was the only G&M batch of Longmorn 1960 ever released and is one of only a tiny handful of known bottlings of Longmorn from this vintage.
Staying with long-aged independently-bottled whiskies, there’s an outstanding Caol lIa 35-year-old Director’s Special Islay single malt whisky bottled in 2021 by Elixir Distillers. This single cask was an edition of just 144 bottles and was bottled at an impressive-for-its-age natural cask strength of 50.9% in an exceptionally sturdy wooden box. These mid-1980s Caol Ilas can be absolutely superb at this sort of age, with the smoke a little dialled down by the decades in the cask to reveal a complex melange of smoked cooked citrus fruit, sweet patisserie spices, chargrilled veggies, and some coastal sea-soaked sand.
Make sure to check the full list of Independent Bottlings in this month’s whisky sale as there’s a broad selection of superb lots including rare editions of Glen Mhor, Dailuaine and some great stuff from The Scotch Malt Whisky Society including the first ever SMWS bottlings of both Glencadam and Croftengea.
Closed Distilleries & Single Casks
We’ll start off our Closed Distilleries highlights with a lovely old official bottling of Rosebank 8-year-old Lowland single malt whisky from the mid-1980s, released in the distillery’s last years as a going concern before being mothballed in 1993.
These Rosebank 8-year-olds were fast-maturing old school Lowland malts that showed remarkable richness and development for their age and despite their softness are often rather weightier and more assertive on the palate than you might expect, with an oily fruitiness and, frequently, some lovely old school sherry influence. It’s genuinely amazing that the distillery was ever closed when it was putting out whisky of this quality, and there’s no doubt Rosebank’s new owners Ian MacLeod will be over the moon if they can replicate this style at the newly-refurbished distillery.
Elsewhere, there’s another Lowland gem, this time from G&M in the form of a small batch St. Magdalene 1964 bottled in the early 1980s shortly before the distillery was closed for good by owners Distillers Company Ltd, who eventually morphed into Diageo.
St. Magdalene was always one of the more complex and characterful Lowland makes, and this superstar St. Magdalene 1964 from the Connoisseurs Choice brown label period is a case in point: a stunning melange of wax, nuts, fresh and dried fruit, oils and spices with more than a hint of sherry. This one was a St. Magdalene for the pantheon, and a poignant reminder of the scale of the loss of this magnificent distillery. Sadly there will be no Rosebank-style revival for St. Magdalene, as the distillery was converted into flats in the early 1990s.
Finally, we have a pair of incredible old Karuizawa Japanese single malt whisky single casks. First up is the fantastic Karuizawa 1984 Cask 2963 bottled in 2011 as a 26-year-old or 27-year-old by Number One Drinks. Cask 2963 was a stunning sherry butt of the Karuizawa distillery’s legendary 1984 vintage, many of which showed a noticeably smoky side to their intensely rich palates.
This 1984 Karuizawa is a symphony of spices, stewed fruits, incense and polished woods with a distinct thread of smoke and was released at its whopping natural cask strength of 57.2% in 2011 at the height of the distillery’s posthumous heyday by Marcin Miller and David & Noriko Croll’s groundbreaking Number One Drinks Company, who were the de facto official bottlers of Karuizawa for the European market, and deserve much more credit for saving the extinct distillery’s stock from owner Kirin’s blending vats and column stills.
Number One Drinks also released another magnificent old single sherry cask of Karuizawa in 2011, this time from the famous 1981 vintage. Karuizawa 1981 Cask 2077 was bottled as a 29-year-old or 30-year-old at its hefty natural cask strength of 56.4%.
This was another absolutely flabbergasting sherry cask of the very highest complexity. Karuizawa had set out to try and copy the classic Macallan vintages of old - some whisky fans might argue that they actually surpassed them. It’s difficult to overstate the seismic effect that these old Karuizawa sherry casks had in the couple of years around the turn of the Noughties when every month seemed to bring yet another otherworldly Japanese whisky to the European drinks scene.
The 1981 and 1984 vintages were the pick of the decade for Karuizawa and these Number One Drinks bottlings captured the best of them in their peak years. Many of these casks were bottled for European retailers and are increasingly difficult to find nowadays. Karuizawa made an unsurpassed Japanese single malt whisky whose only competition comes from its own sister casks, among which any connoisseur privileged enough to encounter them must try and find their own first among equals.
Check out our Closed Distillery lots now for more treats from lost distilleries including gems from Glenury Royal, Glenlochy, Millburn and Dallas Dhu. Our Single Casks this month also feature some official gems from Balvenie, Glenfiddich and Nikka, a string of collectable single casks from English distillery Bimber and long-aged indie bottlings of Bowmore, Highland Park, Longmorn and Lagavulin among many other very tempting treats.
That's it for June 2025's Whisky-Online Auction highlights - check out the full list here, Good Luck and Happy Bidding!