The Ichiro’s Malt Card series is flying high and lifts Hanyu to the top of our distillery ranking. Our major market indices bounce back after their July peak, and some Moon-Import bottlings realize impressive value gains. Here is the price update for August 2019. 

With the eleven thousand trades we observed in August, our whisky database now holds 570 thousand price observations. These August prices averaged around 465 Euros per bottle. With 314 recorded trades, Cadenhead was the most traded independent bottler. Interesting stats like these can be found in our Monthly Summary. You will also find the top ten most traded bottles of the month.
The 42 trades make Macallan Aera displayed above this month’s second most traded whisky. It seems like secondary market prices are steadily declining for this 2018 Macallan release. With 68 bottles traded, the 2019 Macallan Estate release is the overall most traded whisky of the month. The prices averaged 260 Euros. As for many new and rather famous releases, prices drop sharply after the first appearance on auctions.

Fab50 Update

Our major market indices, the Whiskystats Whisky Index (WWI) and the Fab50 Index, reached all-time peaks in July 2019. And both indices dropped around 4% this month. The fifty bottles in our Fab50 index are now worth 122 thousand Euros again, about the same level as they have been since February 2019.
We now want to look at which particular bottles caused this drop for our fabulous fifty. Thirty-one out of the fifty included bottles experienced a price change in August and hence can be responsible for this movement. When we talk about value loss, we find, among others, the Highland Park 28yo (1973) Single Cask 11151. This whisky traded for 1050 Euros in June and is now sold for only 850 Euros. Also in a downward movement are the Glenfiddich Snow Phoenix, the Macallan Private Eye 1996 release and the Springbank 32yo.
But we also find some value gainers among our fifty fabulous releases. The Balvenie Rose 2nd Edition is now trading for more than two-thousand Euros for the very first time. The Yoichi 20yo climbed to 1.400 Euros again. Similar is true for the Ardbeg 25yo (1975), which now sold for more than 800 Euros again.

Value Gainer

The big value gainers of August 2019 are the Hanyu Ichiro’s Malt Card releases. The Three of Spades traded for seven-thousand Euros, the Seven of Clubs for six-thousand Euros and the Queen of Spades jumped to ten-thousand Euros. But the most impressive price was recorded for the Five of Hearts, which sold for 9.700 Euros. All of these had, of course, a massive impact on our Hanyu distillery index, which soared up by more than 14% within a single round of auctions. This helped Hanyu overtake Rosebank and even Karuizawa to now top our distillery ranking.
In our list of the top value gainers, we also find three releases of independent bottler Moon-Import. The Laphroaig 9yo (1984) Sails in the Wind release from 1993 won 700% in value. It was last observed on auctions in November 2013 for 255 Euros. Almost six years later, it traded for no less than two-thousand Euros. The Bowmore 23yo (1985) Le Fanciulle Dell has a similar price history and now sells for 1.200 Euros. To complete the trio of Moon-Import value gainers, we find the Glenlivet 23yo (1985) Le Fanciulle Dell. Prices for this Speyside whisky climbed from 170 Euros in June 2013 to now 1.140 Euros.

Remarkable Trades

When we talk about value gainers of August 2019, we also have to mention the Clynelish 23yo (1972) Rare Malts. In the past, prices hovered between 1.000 and 1.500 Euros, with the exception of 2.500 Euros in October 2018. However, none of this explains why now, in August 2019, a bidder was willing to pay more than 7.500 Euros for this Highlands single malt.
A pretty exciting price observation was made for the below displayed Dalmore 25yo this month. While at Scotch Whisky Auctions, one bottle sold for 720 Euros, a bidder at WhiskyAuctioneer paid almost double that price. Once again, we can highly recommend a Whiskystats membership if you want to prevent mispricing whisky.

And if you already are Whiskystats member, do not forget to recheck on the latest price observations of your very own collections.

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.