Marketed as “the largest and most unprecedented private whisky collection ever to be offered for public sale”, the online auction of Richard Gooding’s ‘The Perfect Collection’ was due to close on 20 April on the Whisky Auctioneer. However, the sale, made up of 1,958 lots, was forced to postpone for 48 hours because of “abnormal excessive loads on the website, which caused some technical issues”.
The Scottish auctioneers later posted a statement on their website to explain that they were postponing the auction indefinitely: “WhiskyAuctioneer.com experienced a targeted, technologically sophisticated, sustained and malicious attack on our website and databases… The website is currently offline whilst we continue to actively investigate this. The auction of The Perfect Collection: Part Two has been postponed with further updates on this and future auctions to follow.”
The first part of Gooding’s collection, comprising more than 1,900 bottles, realised £3.29 million earlier this year. 1,642 bidders from 56 countries took part in the sale. The major highlight was a rare Macallan 1926 Valerio Adami 60 Year Old, which sold for £825,000 and broke the previous hammer price of £702,347, set in October 2018.
A Macallan 1926 Fine and Rare 60 Year Old, one of the world’s most sought-after whiskies, was expected to fetch more than £1 million in the part two auction.
Gooding was from Colorado and a former bottling magnate: his grandfather started the Pepsi Cola Bottling Company of Denver in 1936. He built up his whisky collection over decades, regularly travelling from his home in the US to Scotland with his pilot to source particular bottles at auctions and distilleries before his death in 2014.
