In a year of sovereign tributes, this is the whisky to beat: Royal Salute‘s latest labor of love, the Tribute to Honor, is a limited edition ode to the crown jewels of Scotland—and it’ll set you back US$200,000 a pop, earning it the distinction of being the most expensive whisky on market to date.
The Tribute of Honor is stunning inside and out: handcrafted from ebony black porcelain and designed by Stephen Webster of London-based jeweler Garrard, the flacons are embellished with 22 carats of flawless black and white diamonds—a total of 413 stones handset in silver and gold, no less—on the bottle’s neck and sword emblem.
More fascinating trivia: Royal Salute says Revol, a French porcelain maker, consulted aeronautical engineers in the process of producing over 400 specimens, before sieving out those deemed imperfect for the final limited edition of 21 bottles.
Within the bottles, Royal Salute has sequestered away a precious blend of the rarest whiskies, each aged at least 45 years and all hailing from the Royal Salute vault at the Strathisla distillery in Scotland. Even more astounding trivaL the whiskies used in the blend are so rare that Royal Salute says that only Colin Scott, their Master Blender, has had the privilege of actually tasting the blend.
“Chivas Brothers has a phenomenal archive of high-aged whiskies, some of which, after decades of careful maturation, have acquired a rich intensity and deep concentration of sumptuous characters,” says Colin Scott. “It is these very few whiskies which I have personally selected to compose Tribute to Honour—this opulent and rarest of blends.”
Commenting on the blend, Neil Macdonald, Royal Salute’s Global Brand Director, added: “This has been almost three years in the making. This is the richest, rarest whisky and we needed a worthy way of presenting it. It was a labor of love.”
Each Tribute of Honor bottle is individually numbered, and buyers will receive a small bottle of the whisky so they can sample it without having to open their exquisite investment pieces.
