The whisky auction market is back on track. We now added all historical prices from Whisky.Auction while the Macallan Archival Series Folio 5 and the Ardbeg Blaaaack dominate the market of traded bottles. 

In May 2020, we collected almost 14 thousand price observations from the four different online auctioneers we currently track. So ScotchWhiskyAuctions.com are back from its Corona lockdown, and WhiskyAuctionneer.com fixed its technical problems. In addition, we now processed all the past auction results from Whisky.Auction. We now count 750 thousand prices of 70 thousand whiskies in our database.

The latest round of auctions brought a price update for 7,5 thousand different whiskies. Surprisingly Buffalo Trace is the second most traded distillery of the month, behind Macallan. With 79 trades, the Macallan Archival Series Folio 5 is the most traded whisky. With 69 price observations, the Ardbeg Blaaack follows in second place.

Ardbeg Blaaack

The Ardbeg Blaaack is the most recent instalment of the Ardbeg Committee releases and thereby celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Committee. The black sheep on the label serves as a reminder of the many sheep living on Islay and the Pinot Noir casks used for maturation. Other than that, the distillery leaves us in the black regarding further details about age or maturation.

There will always be a higher volume Committee version and a lower volume standard version of the Blaaack. The Ardbeg Blaaack (Committee Reserve) was traded at auctions for the first time in March 2020. Back then, prices varied between 250 and 300 Euros and averaged about 260 Euros per bottle. The 69 price observations in May averaged 250 Euros, so we do not see any significant price movements yet. A similar pattern can be observed for last year’s Ardbeg Drum (Committee Reserve). The Drum currently trades for 180 Euros.

Whisky.Auction

As announced in the April 2020 price update, we started to track the prices of Whisky.Auction too. With this month’s update, we added all the historical auction results to our database. Compared to the other auctioneers on our watchlist, Whisky.Auction is a relatively small auction platform. Also, they include a lot of other spirits, including wine and champagne. We focus on the whisky lots.
In total, we added more than 31 thousand price observations. As we can see above, the number of traded whisky bottles per month is growing. At the same time, the mean and median price paid per bottle seems relatively constant. Nevertheless, we found the data from Whisky.Auction to fill the one or the other price gap for quite some of the bottles in our database. Also, the data provided some helpful information on the rough release decade for some of the older bottlings.

Do you own the Ardbeg Blaaack or any other mentioned bottle? As a Whiskystats Member, you can now track the value of your collections with a matter of a click, for free!

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.