A bottle of a “highly coveted, valuable and rare” whisky has sold at an auction in Perth, Scotland, for over a million dollars, making the price fetched a world record.

In the online sale conducted by Whisky Auctioneer, with 1,642 bidders from 56 countries joining in, the hammer price on a 60-year-old “Macallan 1926 Valerio Adami” reached $1,072,000.

The auction house said: “If you are successful in winning a lot, buyers pay a 10 per cent commission on the final hammer price.”

This means the buyer in Europe will actually pay $1,179,200, to which will be added shipping and some other costs.

It is understood the buyer intends to open the bottle and savour its contents. The previous world record set in October 2018 was $912,000.

In all, 1,932 bottles sold in the auction as “The Perfect Collection” fetched a total hammer price of $4,277,000.

They all came from the collection of an American whisky lover Richard Gooding, a former PepsiCo bottling magnate who died in 2014, aged 67, after a battle with skin cancer.

His widow Nancy said: “Collecting whisky was one of Richard’s greatest passions — an endeavour spanning over two decades. He loved every aspect of it; from researching the many single malt distilleries to visiting them and tasting their whiskies.”

Gooding’s passion lay in Scotland, where he would often take trips to distilleries and buy cases of whisky, travelling regularly to islands and the mainland with his pilot in search of special bottles.

By value and volume, his collection — which had its own dedicated temperature-controlled room in his home in Colorado known as “the pub” — is the most significant to ever go on public sale.

While, over recent years, the value of his collection would have rocketed, according to whisky writer and consultant, Charles MacLean, it was never about the money.

“He loved searching out bottles, he displayed them magnificently in his house,” MacLean commented. “He was not an investor, that’s why no one in the business had ever really heard of him. For him it was a passion — he collected them for enjoyment, for pleasure and for drinking with friends — that’s why he bought so many of the same bottle. He just really loved whisky.”

This is only the first part of the auction. Another 2,000 bottles from Gooding’s collection will be included in the second phase of the auction.

Iain McClune, who founded Whisky Auctioneer in 2013, said: “Not only was the highest ever sale price for Macallan 1926 Valerio Adami achieved at over a million dollars, Whisky Auctioneer became the first online whisky auction to sell a million dollar bottle, with multiple other lots achieving hammer price world records.”

Whisky expert Angus MacRaild said that the prices were “largely driven by perceived quality of liquid and overall scarcity of each individual bottle.

“Prices were generally high, but hundreds of beautiful, historic and superb old whiskies have found new homes across the world. Some will be kept but most will be opened and enjoyed sooner or later. Something I’m sure Mr Gooding would have wholeheartedly approved of.”

In India, there are clubs where men bond over single malts. They will probably want to know about the provenance of the Macallan 1926 Valerio Adami, as with any fine work of art.

According to the auction company, “there are exceptional casks from Macallan, and then there is cask #263. Given the pervasiveness with which that phrase is now used in relation to the distillery’s output, it is difficult at first to find the correct superlative for this European oak cask, filled nearly 100 years ago. Perfect?

“Cask #263 was deemed too good to be confined to a single presentation. Of the 40 bottles drawn, it was decided that twelve would be labelled by British pop artist, Sir Peter Blake, perhaps best known for providing the iconic cover art for The Beatles’s Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club LP.

“A further twelve later had label art created for them by Valerio Adami after he was recommended to Macallan by their Italian agent, Armando Giovinetti. This is one of those. “Adami is an Italian painter, born in Bologna, Italy, in 1935 and was also associated with the pop art movement.

“This is bottle number 12 of the 12 Valerio Adami labels, a genuine masterpiece of the whisky world. With one bottle known to have been opened, and another rumoured to have been lost in a Japanese earthquake in 2011, this is rarer than ever as well.”