Ardbeg is the most trade distillery of the month. Prices for Port Ellen soar again while an old Springbank pushes its price limit. Here is the Whiskystats Price Update for the extraordinary month of April 2020.

Unfortunately, ScotchWhiskyAuctions.com (SWA) postponed its auctions due to the Covid-19 restrictions. And on April 20, 2020, WhiskyAuctioneer.com (WAE) was the victim of a cyberattack, resulting in an auction stoppage and the postponement of all future auctions. So out of the three auctioneers we track, this month only the Germany based WhiskyAuction.com (WAC) proceeded business as usual.

To account for this and to cover the U.K. market this month, we decided to begin tracking Whisky.Auction (WA). Note that we have so far only imported the results from their March and April 2020 auctions. The historical results beginning in April 2015 will be added in the following weeks.

Our Observations

SWA and WAE are by far the biggest online auctioneers. We usually observe around fifteen thousand whisky bottles auctioned each month. With SWA and WAE temporarily out of business, this figure dropped to 3.500 in the April round of auctions. In addition, this month’s prices are dominated by the German market because WA is a comparably small auctioneer. The weight before was clearly on the U.K. market simply due to the sheer number of bottles traded there.
One notable effect is that Macallan is no longer the most traded distillery. This time, the crown goes to Ardbeg. Macallan appears in third place, even behind Bruichladdich. Rounding out the Top 5 of the most traded distilleries of this month are Springbank and Laphroaig. We also noticed that the average price per bottle dropped to 315 Euros. This is because many of the ultra-rare and ultra-expensive releases tend to appear more often on the big U.K. auction platforms.

Our Top Trades

Nevertheless, we witnessed the trade of many interesting bottles of whisky in April 2020. Take the Springbank 1952 displayed below as an example. This Campbeltown single malt has appeared on auctions only three times. We first observed it back in January 2014 when it sold for 3.500 Euros. Three years later, in March 2017, it fetched 4.900 Euros, a 40% increase in price. Again three years later, in April 2020, we saw almost 21.000 Euros for this bottle. It more than quadrupled in price over the past three years. It will be interesting to find out the price tag in 2023.
Among the ten most traded whiskies of April 2020, we find four expressions from Ardbeg. The Blaaack, the Perpetuum and the Ardbog all made it to the Top 10, as well as the 2018 Private Cask 02/54-4 bottling, whose prices averaged 375 Euros. The second most traded whisky of this month was the Hibiki 17yo. Prices for this Japan blend seem to stabilise at around 400 Euros per bottle. Quite an impressive price history for a whisky that was initially traded for less than 100 Euros.

Our Indices

When you look at our distillery ranking, you may notice that some indices were not updated in April 2020. This is because we require a minimum number of bottles to trade to calculate an index update (as we always have in the past). This threshold was not met in April for some distilleries, so the respective index did not move. Other distilleries did see an index update, and many of them are in the greens. The most-traded Rosebank releases gained another 4% in value. Bowmore gained 3%, too, and Port Ellen fought its way back across the 200 index points with a value increase of 7% in April 2020.
Our two major indices also reflect this overall upward movement. The Whiskystats Whisky Index (WWI) combines the change-in-value of the 500 most traded whiskies overall. A gain of 3.3% brought the WWI back to its February 2020 peak level. In some sense, WWI is artificial since the whiskies contributing to it can change every month. This is different from the Fab50, which represents the value of a fixed set of fifty releases. As we can see above, this hand-selected collection of premium releases outperformed the overall market. Since mid-2018, our Fab50 index has been fighting to get above the 400 points, though, which would mean that the collection is now worth four times its original price.

More than 2.700 whiskies in our database experienced a price change in this latest round of auctions. Recheck your collections to see how these price changes affected the bottles on your shelf.

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.