The secondary whisky market takes a break from its heated winter sprint. Many Port Ellens gained value over the past months, while prices for a Springbank Millenium Edition bounce back and forth. Here is the Whiskystats Price Update for May 2021.

Springbank was the second most traded distillery of this month. The more than 1.110 exchanged bottles left Ardbeg in place three and stayed only behind Macallan with over 1.400 trades. The historically most traded Macallans thereby lost 3.25% in value which saw the distillery dropping to fifth place in our distillery ranking. The close to 17.000 observed prices of this month affected 8.000 different whiskies in our database. About 75% were original bottlings, while this time, the Scotch Malt Whisky Society was the most traded independent bottler.
The WWI displayed above; our broadest market index lost around 1,8%. This is certainly not much, but still the first considerable loss since March 2020. Between November 2020 and April 2021, the WWI gained no less than 22,6%. Sure there were specific market segments with even more impressive streaks in the past, but never before did we observe such severe gains in the overall market. To verify that this affected a broad range of collectable whiskies, we now want to look closely at this heated Winter 20/21 Sprint.

The Winter 20/21 Sprint

To check that all significant whisky regions were participating in this rally, we can use our respective indices. And there, we confirm that, indeed, all the regions saw significant index gains over the bespoke period, with no exception. Next, we want to check whether a specific trading platform drove this sprint. For this purpose, we calculated an index for each of the four auction houses we track. So each month, these indices are driven by changes in the value of the historically most traded whiskies of the respective platform.
And again, we notice that this market movement happened on all platforms alike. Especially the three foremost auctioneers moved in line, while Whisky.Auction was left behind, to at least some degree. Now, in the latest round of auctions, only our Whisky Auction index did not lose points. It is also the auctioneer with the most prolonged consecutive period of index gains. Since December 2019, our Whisky Auction index climbed from 120 to 180 index points. All other (UK-based) auction houses recorded some price setbacks. Also, these indices again show how outstandingly steep the Winter 20/21 Sprint was.
We calculated the breadth of each collectable whisky brand to round up this analysis. The breadth simply measures how many of the bottles gained any value over the period. So 82% of the 111 Port Ellens traded at least two times between November 2020 and April 2021 saw a price increase. For Lagavulin, it was 78%, Ardbeg 75%, and Longrow rounds off the Top 10 with 70%, meaning 55 from the 78 different Longrow bottlings got more expensive. In total, we saw a market breadth of 60%, which is on the upper bound of the range in which the breath is usually moving, as we have seen in our previous analysis.

Remarkable Trades

Over the last few months, we have seen many price gains, along with some setbacks in the May 2021 round of auctions. This is perfectly illustrated by the Springbank 21yo Millenium Edition Cask 15/432-16. In February and March, this single malt fetched around 600 Euros. Then, in April, the price tag escalated to more than 2.100 Euros, only falling back to 730 Euros. So significant gains in the November to April period, followed by a substantial drop in May.

Another remarkable trade is the Springbank 25yo Wedgewood Decanter. This 1970s release was last seen on auctions in May 2014 when it sold for roughly 500 Euros. After exactly seven years, it now reappeared and realized 2.300 Euros which equals a 360% total gain. Also not seen for a long time was the Springbank 12yo (1996) Single Cask 271. The last observation came from way back in July 2011 and was 100 Euros. It now sold for 417 Euros showing that the secondary market is conserving long gone releases.

If you do not know yet, you can track the prices of your whisky collection on 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.