Pretty much everyone can spot a Maker’s Mark bottle across the bar. The squat shape, the red wax bleeding down the neck — you don’t need to read the label.
That’s why it’s actually worth checking out their Artist Series, where the City Edition puts artist Alexandra Pacula’s work on eleven bottles for a slew of cities: New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, Dubai, Delhi, Mumbai, Singapore, Seoul, Sydney, and Melbourne. Seem cool? There’s a catch — it’s airports only.
Inside the nifty container is the same bourbon that’s worked since 1953, when Margie and Bill Samuels Sr. burned the family’s 170-year-old recipe and started over with soft red winter wheat instead of rye. Every bottle still gets hand-dipped, every barrel still rotated by hand.
Sydney, Melbourne, Singapore, and Seoul get their drop this month, London and Paris in August, then Dubai, Delhi, Mumbai, and, finally, JFK and LAX in September.
The airport shelf is big business
Cool label aside, this release is another sign that the duty-free counter has slowly become one of the most lucrative places a whiskey brand can hang out.
Spirits sales in global travel retail rose 6% in value in 2024 while the domestic market sat flat, according to IWSR data — and more than half of duty-free alcohol shoppers say they specifically buy travel-retail-exclusive bottles.
Suntory’s Ashish Sagar says in the release that the series creates a “collectible proposition” for airport retail. Eleven bottles you can only get by flying is exactly that.
More to chew on: American whiskey outpaced Scotch in travel retail that year, then hit a wall in 2025 as tariffs and geopolitics sent international arrivals to the US tumbling — Brown-Forman reported a 7% drop in travel retail sales for its year ending in April 2025.
So it makes sense that nine of these eleven cities are overseas, and the two American airports come last. Maker’s isn’t betting on tourists coming to Kentucky. It’s putting the bottle in front of them in Singapore.
Where to Buy It
Airports, airports, and (you guessed it) more airports. Sydney, Melbourne, Singapore, and Seoul this month; London and Paris in August; Dubai, Delhi, Mumbai, JFK, and LAX in September. Maker’s Mark didn’t announce pricing, so you’ll find out at the duty-free counter — assuming you’ve got a boarding pass.
