Anecdotes of Ages was launched in 2021 as a one-off collaboration between Macallan and Sir Peter Blake, the British pop artist best known for the Sgt. Pepper's sleeve. Blake spent time in Macallan's archive at Easter Elchies and produced a series of collage-style labels, each celebrating a moment from the distillery's two-hundred-year history. The series included a single, very limited bottling — a deeply aged Macallan drawn from sherry-seasoned oak.
The whisky earns its packaging. This is Macallan in its most patient register: the dark-fruited house style stretched into something genuinely old, with secondary notes of leather, walnut and library wood that only long maturation in European oak can give. The texture is thick, almost syrupy, and the flavour develops slowly in the glass over twenty or thirty minutes.
At 43 per cent it is, as ever with old Macallan, gentler than some collectors might prefer, but the concentration of flavour makes any complaint about strength feel beside the point. This is a sipping whisky in the most literal sense — a glass to nurse, not to gulp.
As with most Macallan limited editions, the financial side has run away from the drinking side, and most bottles will spend their lives unopened. That is the usual quiet tragedy of these releases. The liquid, on the rare occasions it meets a glass, is among the finest the distillery has produced this decade.
