August brought solid value gains for many of the most collectable whisky brands. While Macallan leads the way, we focus on those whiskies that were not expensive enough. Here is the Whiskystats Price Update for August 2021.
In our July Price Update, we highlighted Springbank and Bruichladdich since we observed some severe and constant value gains over the past 20 months. Well, this month, it is precisely these two distilleries that account for the most significant setbacks in our monthly updated distillery ranking. The historically most traded whiskies from Springbank lost 4% in value, while those from Bruichladdich suffered an almost 8% loss.
On the green side of the August 2021 secondary whisky market, we find Dalmore, Macallan, and Auchentoshan. While our Dalmore and Macallan indices gained 3,7% and 4,9%, respectively, prices for some collectable Auchentoshans soared up by 5,2%. This brought Auchentoshan straight into the Top 20 of our ranking, overtaking Caol Ila, Tullibardine, and Ben Nevis. The overall market, represented by our Whiskystats Whisky Index (WWI), gained 0,5% too.
Unsold Lots
While we added another 15,6 thousand price observations to our whisky database this month, we also recorded 353 auction lots that have not sold. The reason could be that the reserve price did not meet the reserve price, or there were simply no bids. Although we certainly track this information, we haven’t made much use of it by now. However, this is viable information when you try to assess the value of your whisky, and hence we have plans to make it accessible on a per-bottle basis in a future Whiskystats update. For the moment, we can have a bird’s-eye view of the topic.
The visualisation above shows the relative share of unsold whisky auction lots every month for the past six years. Interestingly this share slowly increased from 2% and below in 2015 to 4% and above in early 2019. Over the past two years, though, we have observed a decreasing relative number of auction lots that did not attract high enough bids. This figure is fluctuating around 2% over the last couple of auction rounds. Note that the one downward spike was during the turbulences of the 2020 Covid spring, where some auctions were postponed or cancelled.
Remarkable Not-Trades
Generally, we highlight whiskies that achieved incredible prices at this point, either due to solid value gains or losses or whiskies we have not seen at auction for a very long time. This month we thought it would be pretty fitting to look at some lots that failed to sell. A prominent example is the below displayed Macallan 72yo Lalique Decanter. Two bottles were on sale, and both of them reached 76.000 Euros. But one of these lots had a higher reserve price, and hence the bottle was not sold. Looking at the historical auction results, it seems like this is about the level at which the secondary market sees this prestigious Macallan release, at least for the last year or so.
Another example is the 750ml version of the Bowmore 14yo (1974) The Costumes from Moon-Import. In December 2020, this whisky jumped to 4.700 Euros as the maximum price was 2.200 Euros before that. Perhaps this was also about where the seller set the reserve price this month. Although the respective lot attracted 71 bids, the final bid of around 4.200 Euros failed to meet the reserve, and hence this lot did not sell either.
Most of the time, it is the high-valued lots where we see a reserve and, hence, comparably many bottles that fail to sell. But there are exceptions, as the Macallan Edition No.5 demonstrates, which was unable to attract high enough bids in multiple instances this month.
What about the bottles in your collection? Did you know that you can track the market value of your collection with Whiskystats?
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.