Sometime in 1926, the Macallan distillery in the Scottish highlands took locally grown malted barley and, using their small copper stills, transformed it into whiskey. They poured the single malt into an old Spanish oak cask that had once held sherry and then put it in a warehouse, where for 60 years, while wars were won and lost and man traveled to the moon and back, it sat collecting dust. Waiting.

On December 8, the wait will be over. Christie’s will auction off a bottle of this mahogany-hued liquor and many other vintage spirits in New York. The 1926 Macallan, which was bottled at cask strength in 1986 and has been in a private collection in the Midwest since then, is expected to fetch between $20,000 and $30,000.

The auction itself is as rare as its lots. While wine connoisseurs have been able to buy and sell trophy bottles at auction for years, most states still prohibit the auction of spirits, a holdover from Prohibition. After the 18th Amendment was repealed in 1933, it fell to the individual states to regulate the sale of alcohol, a process that moved slowly and cautiously in the face of conservative attitudes toward drinking. Just eight states, including Illinois and Virginia, allow the auction of spirits (17 permit wine auctions); in August, New York became the latest addition to the list, when Governor Eliot Spitzer signed a bill that had taken two years to work its way through the legislature.

It couldn’t have come at a better time. New York City has become a major auction market for vintage and collectible wine. The 11 wine sales by Christie’s last year in New York and Los Angeles totaled almost $28 million, up 78 percent from the year before. (Commercial wine auctions have been legal in New York since 1993.) Given New Yorkers’ seemingly insatiable appetite for all things high-priced, from penthouse apartments to foreign cars to contemporary art, it’s no surprise wine auctions would do so well. And trophy whiskeys seem poised to become the next status symbol.

All over Europe, bottles of vintage cognac and whiskey are auction house staples. For more than 40 years, Christie’s has included vintage spirits in their wine sales in London, but some of the best-known spirits auctions are held by McTear’s in Glasgow, which has been doing so since 2000. The Scottish auction house holds four sales a year, which total from $900,000 to over $1 million. According to Martin Green, author of Collecting Malt Whisky and a consultant at McTear’s, interest in these auctions has been steadily increasing, in part because McTear’s began allowing online bidding in March. The auctions themselves are also growing: The number of bottles sold at each sale has roughly doubled since 2000.

Over the past few years, vintage spirits have become increasingly valuable too—especially rare bottles from well-known distilleries. A special bottle that Macallan released for the 1981 wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana—it contained whiskey from both of their birth years—sold originally for just $80 and went for $857 in 2006. This year, according to Green, a bottle of the same special Macallan sold for $1,326. A bottle of Bowmore from 1979 sold for $592 in 2003 and, according to Green, sold for $1,000 in 2006. Just this September, a bottle of Bowmore dating from around 1850—making it the oldest Bowmore known to be in existence—set a world record, selling for $59,979 last month in Scotland.