As a brand, scotch whisky purveyors The Macallan are known for a few things. Innovation in sherry cask maturation. Expensive limited releases. Effective marketing. And yes, the occasionally silly gimmick. Today, the brand shared one of the latter, unveiling its collaboration with Bentley Motors, titled The Macallan Horizon. An immediately eye-catching bottle, it is encased in an intricate cage of sorts, made from a variety of upcycled materials. It’s also designed to lay horizontally rather than stand up vertically, which is to say: You won’t be getting this thing into your liquor cabinet or bar shelving any time soon. It’s a bit of an absurd concept, but I suppose that’s how you generate whisky geek attention these days, so who are we to deny it to them?
Macallan describes its repurposed materials concept for the bottle casing with the following:
In homage to The Macallan’s acclaimed Six Pillars, the foundation stones of the brand that account for its distinctive single malt whiskies, The Macallan Horizon concept product incorporates six unique upcycled, repurposed or ethically sourced materials which are integral to The Macallan and Bentley Motors. Among them are recycled copper from the disused curiously small spirit stills which were located within The Macallan’s former Distillery; aluminum recovered from the Bentley Motors manufacturing process; recycled wood; recyclable glass and carbon neutral leather, locally sourced, and also used in the recently unveiled Bentley Mulliner grand tourer.
The effect is a long, horizontal-balancing mesh of metal that looks a bit like one of the famously “cigar-shaped” UFO sightings, as seen in the photo above, hovering above a nighttime scene. You can also see the structure of the cage more closely in the embeded photo below, showing off an admittedly lovely copper hue. It’s a bottle that practically begs for you to install a mantle of some kind, if only to have a natural place to enshrine this thing.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the brand includes zero details about the makeup, specs or actual flavors of the whisky in that initial press release, which means all the focus essentially has to go squarely on the bottle design rather than its contents. Suffice to say, it will probably be a very luxe purchase, with very rare single malt scotch whisky involved, but few details about pricing or the release are currently available. In fact, the whisky itself doesn’t arrive until the summer of 2023—why the brands are announcing it now, almost a year in advance, isn’t entirely clear.
Perhaps it’s to give you time to get that mantle ready?