There are things that don’t feel real until you say them out loud. Like this: someone—two someones, actually, a father and son named John and George Urquhart—filled a single American oak cask with Glenlivet spirit in the winter shadow of 1940, a week before Pinocchio premiered in theaters. And now, in 2025, that same whisky has been bottled. Not metaphorically. Actually. Tangibly. Eighty-five years of patient, wood-darkened silence.
Come October, independent bottler Gordon & MacPhail will release what is now the world’s oldest single malt Scotch: an 85-year-old Glenlivet that edges past last year’s Macallan Time: Space (84 years old) for the historical record. Just 125 decanters have been filled from Cask 336, which was finally emptied on 5 February 2025. The ABV? A jaw-dropping 43.7%. Not evaporated into ghostliness. Not bitter with too much wood. It is, by all accounts, still alive.
“This is a living piece of history,” said Stephen Rankin, Gordon & MacPhail’s director of prestige and great-grandson of John Urquhart. And he’s not just playing auctioneer semantics. There’s something unnervingly animate about any whisky that has survived longer than most nations’ constitutions—longer than many marriages, longer than vinyl, longer than war.
The Glenlivet 85 will come housed in a bespoke decanter designed by American architect Jeanne Gang, known more for glass and steel than for cut crystal and copper rivets. She leaned into the theme “artistry in oak,” drawing on what she called the shared language of material and time between architecture and whisky-making. “Both are about creating something enduring,” Gang said, which might be a thesis statement for the whole endeavor.
Decanter No. 1 will go under the hammer at Christie’s New York in November 2025, with proceeds—minus hard costs—donated to the nonprofit conservation group American Forests. The gesture is apt. After all, it was a tree—oak, American—that kept this liquid safe across a century’s worth of global upheaval.
Gordon & MacPhail, still independent, still family-owned after four generations, has a quiet reputation for this sort of thing. For decades, they’ve sourced spirit from over 100 Scottish distilleries, and they’ve made a habit of bottling the kinds of whiskies others let evaporate into myth.
For more information on what is now the world’s oldest single malt Scotch, head over to the brand’s official website.
Last year, Glenlivet launched its oldest bottling as part of the debut of its Eternal Collection, 55-year-old whisky.
