Macallan dominated the whisky auction year of 2017 in every aspect. Highland Park became the third most traded single malt distillery. Prices for japanese single malts stabilized again. This is the second part of our annual report for 2017.

In the first part of our Annual Report of 2017 we found out that the secondary whisky market keeps on growing in every sense. In the past year we observed more than 60.000 trades of single malt bottlings which trading volumes summed up to almost 21 Million Euros. We now want to dig deeper in this data and find out what the major market movements of the secondary whisky market in 2017 were.

Major Market Movements

As we are not getting tired to mention we are currently observing the Grand Macallan Price Rally. Our Macallan distillery index is breaking through every barrier since it started it´s upward movement in early 2016. So of course we have to mention Macallan if we are ask what the major trends of 2017 were. The 100 most traded Macallans gained almost 40% in value in 2017! This of course also fired-up our index for the Speyside region. In the late summer months of 2017 this index even overtook our japan index which was flying high since the peak of the Japanese Whisky Boom.
A look at our region indices also unveils another big market movement we observed in 2017. The 100 most traded Islay bottlings barely changed in value and even lost 9% from May to October 2017. At the same time our Highland index, which describes the value development of the currently 100 most traded Highland bottlings, increased by more than 14%. It also looks like in 2017 the prices for japanese single malts finally stabilized again. While in late 2015 and throughout 2016 our japan index experienced harsh down and upwards movements with an overall clear downward trend we even observed a solid upward direction in the last couple of months. Since August 2017 the worth of the 100 most traded japanese single malts climbed by 6% again.

The Most Traded Distilleries

If you follow our monthly price updates it can´t be of any surprise for you if we tell you that Macallan was the most traded single malt distillery of 2017. What may could surprise you is the margin between Macallan and all other distilleries. In 2016 Macallan and Ardbeg both had around 3.800 trades that we observed. In 2017 the figures for Ardbeg did not changed much. We observed 3.795 trades for this Islay distillery. And then there is Macallan. In 2017 alone we observed 4.794 trades. Compared to the 3.870 observation back in 2016 this equals a 24% increase in the number of trades! So we are currently not only observing a Macallan rally in terms of price increases but also in number of bottles traded.
On the third place of the most traded distilleries we find Highland Park. In 2016 the 1.740 trades brought Highland Park on place seven. The 2.622 trades in 2017 mean a 50% increase in the number of bottles traded! If we compare the eight most traded distilleries of 2016 and 2017 we notice that Glenmorangie dropped out of the list and instead Glendronach takes the eighth place with 2.123 trades. Last years eighth placed Glenmorangie had 1.723 bottles traded.

Age Still Matters

In last year´s annual report we tried to find an easy to understand measure for how the prices paid on the auction markets depend on the age statements. For this purpose we simply computed the average prices paid in 2016 for all 21yo, 25yo, 30yo, 40yo and 50yo bottlings. Unsurprisingly an obvious pattern was observed. The older the bottlings, the higher the prices which ranged from 250 Euros for the 21 years-old to 2.000 Euros for the 50 years-old. For 2017 we simply repeated this analysis and the result speak a clear language.
First of all we notice that the average prices for all bottling ages increased. For the 21yo the average price paid per bottle climbed from 250 Euros to 280 Euros. For the 30yo prices climbed from 650 Euros to 820 Euros on average. The very rare and comparable seldom traded 50yo bottling experienced the most dramatic price increase. While in 2016 the prices for 50 years of maturation averaged to roughly 2.000 Euros, in 2017 this value increased to 3.800 Euros! By the way, we did the same kind of analysis back in February 2016 too when we compared our results to those of Rare Whisky 101.