Investing in whisky; the good, the bad, the ugly.
Like us, have you ever thought of getting a piece of the whisky action? We have had a go, it is bloody hard to get right, much of what we did was luck, or being in the right place at the right time. We have so many of our guests/clients on whisky tours, asking us about investment, we say “be careful”. At the end of the day why is whisky made – to drink of course. Looking at this from another angle, if you bought a super doper E Type Jag 20 years ago, what is it worth now? Whisky; how long do you need to hold onto it before profit creeps up? A cask; many years. A bottle; depends on the bottle and luck, or is it skill? There are so many websites offering you a service, some are really helpful and worthy, some I’m sorry to say are not, just look at this … Available online as rare; Balvenie 40 year old £3,500.00 – it is available at Glenfiddich and many other outlets, it is on Amazon; The Balvenie 40 Year Old Single Malt Whisky FREE delivery, why is this rare? Another so called rare whisky website state: We specialise in excellence – we only stock rare malt whiskies. Every single bottle we present to you will be in some way significant: it may be a single cask edition or a one-time release bottling… but on this website it shows Glenfarclas Distillery Exclusive 2004 Port Cask £199.00 (it sold at auction for 85 quid) and Aberlour A’Bunadh Batch 58 at £79.00 (same auction site 55 quid, sorry guys these are NOT rare or hard to find. Rare; adjective: rare; comparative adjective: rarer; superlative adjective: rarest. synonyms: infrequent, few and far between, scarce, sparse, scattered, thin on the ground, golden, like gold dust, as scarce as hen’s teeth; (of a thing) not found in large numbers and so of interest or value.
Phrases such as; specialising in Old & Rare Whiskies. Using passion, knowledge, experience we specialise in sourcing the rarest of world whiskies, but if you look at that site (not mentioning this by the way) it offers Yamazaki 12 Year Old for £149.00, BUT it’s available at Amazon – Suntory Yamazaki Whisky 12 Year Old 70cl for only £113.00. This is not rare or hard to find. Do your own homework. You have to be so careful when buying “rare or hard to find whisky”, with some bottles going for obscene prices at auction, this is creating a panic in whisky buying, forcing prices up, when there is no need for this. You can buy a bottle of Macallan Double Cask 12 Year Old whisky for $71. You could also, if you have have $11,000 in your back pocket buy a bottle of Macallan Fine & Rare 1990. A 750ml single malt 60 year old Macallan 1926 whisky sold at Bonham’s in Edinburgh for a record price of £848,800 or just over $1.1 million. WHO IS BUYING these bottles? Are they ever going to drink them? How large is the market for whisky of this ilk? Be careful when venturing into the whisky investment world, there are pitfalls like every other investment. AN INVESTMENT IS ONLY PROFITABLE WHEN SOMEONE OFFERS TO BUY IT! Otherwise it’s a white elephant. We have dabbled in this on a very small scale, some are duds and we have learnt the hard way, others we have had good luck. With these good luck sales, it has enabled us to buy ‘drinking whisky’ to enjoy, not for a dusty cupboard or safe vault.#
A Third of rare Scotch whiskies tested found to be fake, story as published 20.12.18
More than a third of vintage Scotch whiskies tested at a specialist laboratory have been found to be fake, BBC Scotland has learned. Twenty-one out of 55 bottles of rare Scotch were deemed to be outright fakes or whiskies not distilled in the year declared. The tests were conducted at the East Kilbride-based Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC). It used advanced radiocarbon dating techniques to reach its conclusions. SUERC measured residual concentrations of a radioactive isotope of carbon present in the alcohol contained in each bottle in order to establish the ages of the whiskies.
The rare whisky bottles identified as fakes this year included an Ardbeg 1885, which had been acquired from a private owner and a Thorne’s Heritage early 20th Century blended whisky purchased from an auctioneer. The company said that if tests had proven all 21 bottles to be genuine, collectively they could have been valued at about £635,000. RW101 has estimated that about £41m worth of rare whisky which is currently circulating in the secondary market – and present in existing collections – is fake.