Bentley has designed a sustainable Whisky bottle

Never fear, Bentley has not installed stills into the Crewe assembly plant. Very sensibly it has gone to Speyside and the renowned distillery, The Macallan, for the liquid inside the bottle, with whom Bentley has enjoyed a wee dram (in a brand collaboration sense) since 2021.

The single malt is doubtless superb but it’s the actual bottle that gets the headlines here. It’s called the Macallan Horizon and has been jointly developed by teams from both Bentley and Macallan. Being horizontal rather than vertical, and sitting inside a bespoke cradle, it is true to say it is not at all bottle shaped, as the pictures show.

On the shape of it, The Macallan’s Jaume Ferras tells us: “Working with Bentley Motors has inspired us to see things differently. In the whisky world, everything is upright.”

The famed Scottish nectar is contained within a flattened vessel of hand-made glass with a 180- degree twist in it. The “bottle” can’t fall over because it’s inside a cradle made up of a lot of leftovers from the car-making and whisky-distilling businesses. Wonder how much whisky the creatives had to drink to come up with that idea…

So you get a cradle that’s been hand-crafted from recycled copper from disused whisky stills, aluminium recovered from the production of the Continental GT, recycled wood from both brands and low-CO2 Scottish leather as used in the new Bentley Mulliner Batur. All these things come together in an intricately twisted 3D structure that does appear quite beautiful in a very Bentley kind of way.

Bentley’s head of lifestyle Chris Cooke says the effect is an “extraordinary interplay between light and the repurposed wood, aluminium and copper.” He adds: “In being both an object of beauty in itself and having such strong sustainability elements, it’s a representation of what’s coming next from our partnership.”

The Macallan Horizon will be available as a limited edition from Bentley dealers (though possibly not Tesco’s booze aisle) from summer next year. Price? Still secret, but whatever it is, this is one bottle that you wouldn’t want to end up in the recycling bin after you’ve enjoyed its contents…