The Bard Goes to Tesco: An £8,800 Macallan and the Monument That Sang
AI illustration for the4pegs.com, in our So Scottish palette.
There are things you expect to find on your Tesco shop, and there is The Macallan Robert Burns Semiquincentenary — a 1998-vintage, 12-year-old single malt that belongs in a collector's cabinet, sitting quietly on Tesco Marketplace for £8,799.95, next to the add-to-basket button. Collect your Clubcard points with that. It's sold and sent by specialist retailer Hard To Find Whisky, and it's possibly the most gloriously Scottish collision I've ever seen online: the national bard, Speyside's most collectible distillery, and the weekly grocery run. With the Burns season coming, it felt like a story worth telling properly.
The Bottle in the Basket
What £8,799.95 actually buys you:
A 70cl hand-numbered decanter of 1998-vintage Macallan, 46% ABV, with cask-strength character and a rich sherry influence
An individually numbered Robert Burns poem to go with the bottle
A presentation box made from genuine Scottish red pine
The seller's guarantee that the stopper has never been unsealed
At £12,571.36 a litre, it is comfortably the most expensive thing per millilitre I've ever come across on a grocery website. Delivery is by courier, with free returns within 30 days — though I'd love to see the face of whoever sends that one back.
250 Bottles, Two Casks, One Bard
Released in 2009 for the 250th anniversary of Burns's birth — and there will never be any more of them.
The Semiquincentenary edition was drawn from two sherry casks personally chosen by Macallan whiskymaker Bob Dalgarno — one filled in 1997, one in 1998, and both, by design, numbered cask #1759, after the year the Bard was born. Only 250 bottles were ever released. Each came in a specially commissioned box bearing Burns's image, with a map of Burns Country and the numbered poem inside. One collector's note worth knowing: the distillery originally sold these unsealed, which is exactly why provenance matters with bottles like this — the good dealers stand on what they sell, and the sealed-stopper guarantee on this listing is the sort of detail you want to see.
When the Monument Sang
Edinburgh's own monument to Burns once filled with Auld Lang Syne in 27 languages.
Burns's monument isn't just a place to visit — it's a place that has been sung in. In the summer of 2021, Edinburgh Art Festival and Talbot Rice Gallery installed Song of the Union by Nigerian-born, Berlin-based artist Emeka Ogboh inside the Burns Monument on Regent Road, at the foot of Calton Hill. He'd had the idea in February 2020, days after MEPs marked the UK leaving the EU with a spontaneous chorus of Auld Lang Syne in the European Parliament. His answer was to find 27 singers living in Edinburgh, one from every EU member state, and record each of them singing Auld Lang Syne in their own native tongue. Inside the little monument, the recordings overlap — the tune familiar, the words suddenly not — and, by every account, it was unexpectedly moving. The Bard's own corner of the city, doing what he does best: making strangers into company.
Winter sunset over the Burns Monument on Regent Road — the little temple where Ogboh's Song of the Union once played. Photo: Sharon McMenemy Khan.
Cobble stones and Arthur's Seat from the Burns Monument. Photo: Sharon McMenemy Khan.
A Burns Nod Without the Remortgage
For most of us, a dram and a print will do nicely.
If £8,800 is a stretch this January, the Burns Monument photographs above are available as prints in our So Scottish shop, from £30 — the winter sunset and the Arthur's Seat views among them. And for a proper Burns night of your own, I'll Wad A Boddle!, a little ebook of Burns brunches, bowls and suppers, comes in at £4.50 — roughly one two-thousandth of the price of the decanter, and honestly more likely to be opened on Burns Night.
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