There is no question that 2020 was an exceptional year. Our annual report will reflect last year’s whisky auction market. Is the overall growth still intact? Which market segments performed best? Here is the Whiskystats Annual Report of 2020.
First, we want to address the most urgent question: did the global pandemic affect the whisky auction market? And the answer is yes, it did. One of the biggest online auctioneers was out of service for months due to the restrictions. This closure affected the number of bottles traded in 2020. But the market did not plunge. After a slight dip in spring, prices continued to increase, for some segments quite significantly and for others not so much.
Please note that we started to track the results of Whisky.Auction in spring 2020. Since we processed all historical results, some figures will not match the results of our previous annual reports.
Market Growth
First, we want to examine the market’s overall growth. We counted the number of price observations we made on all the auction platforms tracked. With around 175 thousand bottles, 2020 surpassed 2019 only just. And although this figure keeps on climbing, the growth slowed down, and quite significantly so. But the reason for this is apparent. As mentioned above, ScotchWhiskyAuctions.com paused its service due to the Covid-restrictions. On top of that, WhiskyAuctioneer.com also suspended some of its auctions due to technical issues. Without those extraordinary circumstances, we suppose 190 thousand bottles could have been in reach.
Next, we turn our attention to the money spent on auctions. For this, we convert all prices to Euros using the historic exchange rates and include the buyer fees but exclude shipping costs and the like. And although there were more bottles traded in 2020 than in 2019, the total trading volume fell from 75 million Euros to 72.5 million Euros. The average price paid per bottle was 415 Euros, which is less than the 437 Euros from 2019. But the median price increased to 151 Euros. This means that 50% of all bottles auctioned in 2020 did so for less than 151 Euros.
But the average and median prices are not the most valuable tools to measure the price changes because they depend on which bottles were traded. That is why we use our Whiskystats Indices, which track the actual changes in the value of the respective bottles.
Major Market Indices
We regularly update you about the movements of our major market indices in the Whiskystats Monthly Updates. For this annual report, we now focus solely on the movements in 2020. To do so, we norm the index values to 100 in January 2020 and can directly compare the different indices. The Whiskystats Whisky Index (WWI), driven by the 500 historically most traded whiskies each month, saw an annual increase of almost 25% last year. This gain is even more impressive considering that in 2019, the WWI only gained a humble 1,2% in total.
On the other hand, our Fabulous Fifty (Fab50) collection gained 12,5%. This hand-selected ensemble of prestigious single malts is now worth almost 130 thousand Euros, more than ever. Out of these fifty bottles, there is only one for which we did not observe at least one trade, hence a price update in 2020. This is the Glenfarclas 46yo (1954), last seen on auctions in November 2019, when it sold for 1.000 Euros.
Region Indices
We repeat the same index comparison for the major whisky regions we differ. Like the two major market indices above, the year was off to a good start, but we observed a dip in spring. Any doubts were wiped away immediately, though, and except for the Lowlands, all of our region indices gained severely. Topping all others is Campbeltown, which naturally was mainly driven by the Springbank distillery, as we shall see later. Our Campbeltown index gained no less than 35% last year.
The only other region close to this is Islay, with a plus of 27%. On the places follow Speyside (+21%), the Highlands (+19%), and the Islands (+15%). Last year’s number one whisky region was Japan, as our Japan index gained 22% in 2019. It now looks like the price rally for Japanese whisky is taking a little break. But still, an annual increase of 8% also meant that this index arrived at a new all-time peak. The Lowlands gained strongly from March to June but gave away a lot of ground in the remainder of the year.
Top Distilleries
By looking at the index movements of the top single malt distilleries, we drill down the above region indices. Hence, it is no big surprise that the Springbank distillery accounts for one of the most impressive performances of 2020. A gain of almost 30% brought Springbank three places up the ladder and straight into the Top 15. Another strong performer of 2020 was Glenfarclas. The index of this Speyside distillery gained no less than 23%. Glendronach, Macallan, Port Ellen, and Ardbeg all increased by around 20%.
On the downside, we find Bowmore and Hanyu. These distillery indices share a similar story: they are currently consolidating after huge gains in the past. After a two-year rally in which our Bowmore index almost doubled, it reached its peak in June 2018 but since has lost more than 20%. For Hanyu, we observed the drastic price jumps from May to October 2019, which catapulted the index 45% north to 417 index points. So although the 2020 performances seem poor, putting them into perspective to those considerable gains in the past clarifies a lot.
At last, we would also like to mention that 2020 was an excellent year for Whiskystats. We counted more than 3000 new members in 2020 alone, and the number of daily visitors doubled over the past twelve months. And the future looks bright, too, as there are many new projects we are currently working on, so stay tuned.
Disclaimer: the whisky market insights presented in this article are based on the Whiskystats database at the time of publication. Whiskystats is constantly adding new data, and therefore some charts and figures may not match after initial publication.