Dalmore climbs up the ladder of our distillery ranking, while our Fabulous Fifty collection index reaches 400 points again. Meanwhile, we observed a lot of ridiculously high prices for some low profile bottles. Here is our Price Update for November 2020.
At the moment, we are updating our database once a month. The timing is determined by the two major UK auctions (SWA and WAE), which usually take place on the month’s first weekend. Although the two other auctioneers (WA and W.A) run a monthly schedule too, they often change the auction dates. To account for this, we assigned the “2020-11” and the “2020-12” WA auctions, as well as the “November 2020” and the “December 2020” W.A auctions, to our November round of auctions.
Note that we internally track the exact day on which the auction was held. We plan to switch to a “daily” assignment scheme next year, which will allow one to identify the exact day on which each bottle is sold. But for the time being, the November 2020 round of auctions was a rather big one. We added more than 25 thousand new price observations to our database, which affected almost 12 thousand different bottles of whisky.
Index Movements
Our major market index, the Whiskystats Whisky Index (WWI), continues to stabilize at a level of 230 index points. After the setback in the second half of 2019, the WWI recovered quickly in early 2020 and reached the new all-time top at 230 index points in May. Our Fabulous Fifty collection gained 1,7% in value this month, which brings it back to above 400 index points. This peak was observed only once, back in July 2019. These fifty hand-selected bottles are now worth 127.000 Euros again.
Our distillery ranking reveals that Dalmore showed the best performance among our top-ranked distilleries. This Highland distillery’s 100 most traded releases gained more than 6% in value. This pushed Dalmore to the eighth place in our ranking, leaving Yoichi and Port Ellen behind. On the downside, the 100 most traded releases from Glendronach lost more than 5%. However, this comes after our Glendronach index gained more than 25% over the past twelve months.
Remarkable Trades
For the remarkable trades from this round of auctions, we want to focus on some price observations that could be classified as “outliers”. These are regularly traded whiskies, which experienced significant price jumps this month. Take the Tomatin Decades as an example. In 2019, this whisky sold for around 100 Euros on a regular basis. Then prices climbed step by step until they reached 200 Euros. And now, at WAE, more than 800 Euros were paid. A similar thing happened in October 2019, so we should expect prices to fall below 200 Euros again.
But there are more examples of ridiculous price observations in November 2020. The Arran Explorers Series (Kildonan & Pladda Island) fetched 730 Euros on SWA compared to the 170 Euros paid on WAE. The Compass Box Peat Monster (White Label) sold for 60 Euros on WA and 280 Euros at SWA. And then there is the Glenrothes 19yo (1999) Single Cask 8190. In September 2020, this Speyside whisky traded for 150 Euros. Two months later, one of these 274 bottles fetched 1.100 Euros.
As always, remember to recheck on the latest changes in the value of your personal 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.