Make mine Macallan
By STAFF David Kirkpatrick, Michael Rogers, Patricia Sellers, H. John Steinbreder, and Daniel P. Wiener

(FORTUNE Magazine) – The stuporous brown-liquor market, pushed off its bar stool by consumers who have switched to white beverages like vodka, wine, and club soda, may have found its tonic in single-malt whiskies. While blended-whisky sales have slumped, the single malts have become popular to drink and even to collect. In late May, Scotland's Macallan Distillery put eight bottles of 60-year-old single-malt whisky up for sale. One bottle received a bid of about $8,000, more than the auction price of many fine wines, and almost four times the previous high for a whisky -- a 50-year-old Macallan sold last year.

While garden-variety Scotch is made from a blend of malt and grain whiskies, single-malt whisky is made straight from malted barley. Distillers began marketing single malts in the 1960s, but they only recently gained popularity in the U.S., the largest whisky market. While U.S. Scotch consumption has dropped from 20 million cases in 1980 to 16.5 million last year, the single- malt market has grown from 100,000 cases to 215,000 over the same period, according to M. Shanken Communications, a market research firm. That is only 1.3% of the total whisky market, but, says Frank Walters, the firm's research director: ''With the snob appeal, it's the most promising category in the whisky market.'' Liquor experts say a 60-year-old single malt is valuable only because it is rare, since it probably has the same peaty flavor as the common 16-year-old stuff. ''The collection of whisky is a strange thing, since it doesn't change once it's in bottles,'' says Duncan McEuen, director of Christie's wine department in London. ''People collect the most interesting things.''