The October round of auctions brought significant value gains for Springbank and Yamazaki. The Highlands are the only region with an index loss, while Ardnamurchan faces the young distillery’s fate. Here is the Whiskystats Price Update for October 2021.

Last month we identified 19 thousand different whisky bottles traded on the auction platforms we track. We now count more than 1 million identified prices in our database, marking a new milestone that we celebrated in our recent article. We also announced that Whiskystats is now partnering with Whiskybase and that our new website will make use of the Whiskybase bottle database. But for the time being, we run our own bottle database in which almost 10 thousand out of the 83 thousand bottles experienced a price change this month.

Highlands Dropout

Both the Whiskystats Whisky Index (WWI) and the Fabulous Fifty Collection (Fab50) mark a new all-time peak as they climbed by 3.1% and 2.3%, respectively. The 100 historically most traded Japanese whiskies gained 2.33% in value, bringing our Japan index to 999,64 points – by far the highest index value we have ever recorded. As we can see from the below-displayed indices for the Scotch regions, a -1.23% index loss makes the Highlands the only whisky region we see in the reds this October.
While Islay and Speyside continue their battle for the top spot in this Scotch region ranking, Campbeltown accounted for the highest increment. The 100 whiskies that drove our Campbeltown index experienced a 7.69% increase in price. Responsible for this is the Springbank distillery with its subbrands Hazelburn and Longrow. Since June 2020, we have observed substantial value gains for these secondary market favourites. Over the past 16 months, our Springbank index, including subbrands, gained 46% finding its way into the Top 10 of our distillery index ranking.
To back these abstract figures with some tangible information, we want to highlight some whiskies responsible for these index movements. The first example is the Springbank 13yo (2003) Single Cask above. Until January 2020, this whisky was traded regularly for less than 200 Euros. Since then prices moved to 300 Euros and then 500 Euros to now arrive at almost 700 Euros. The Springbank 10yo 100 Proof (from the 1990s) climbed to 470 Euros after initially trading for 58 Euros back in February 2011. Similar story for the Springbank 18yo (the old one with the blue label), which now fetched 400 Euros on average.

Young Distillery’s Fate

The Ardnamurchan distillery started production in 2014 on the identically named peninsula, making it the most westerly distillery on the Scottish mainland and one of the youngest Scotch whisky distilleries overall. As for many of these distillery youngsters, first releases were strongly anticipated and found their way onto the secondary market. There they realized incredible high prices for what they are, and that is very young scotch single malt whisky. The below displayed Ardnamurchan 5yo AD/CK.335 07:15 achieved 960 Euros at its peak.
The other common pattern we see for these early releases of new distilleries is that those price levels often do not last. The AD/CK.335 07:15 traded six times last month, and prices averaged 287 Euros. In June this year, the AD/12:14 CK.440 fetched 346 Euros and has now dropped to around 150 Euros. It is the same story for the AD/05:15 CK.181 with 210 Euros in June and 130 Euros now. Of course, this also affects our distillery indices which suffer huge losses from these price movements. Hence we find Ardnamurchan at the bottom of our ranking, together with the likes of Wolfburn, Bimber, Daftmill, and also Kilchomann.

Remarkable Trades

Last but not least, we want to point out some more incredible trades. Our Yamazaki distillery index gained almost 10% within only one round of auctions. Responsible for this are, among others, the Yamazaki Mizunara Cask 2012, which climbed above 5.000 Euros for the first time and both the Yamazaki Limited Edition 2016 and the Yamazaki 18yo Limited Edition, which reached new record prices too. The Dalmore Cabernet Sauvignon (Haut Marbuzet Finish) below was sold for 6.100 Euros (including buyer fees) at WhiskyAuctioneer.com.

There were three whiskies of which more than 100 bottles changed owners in October 2020. With 148 identified trades, the Macallan Concept Number 3 leads this list. The prices ranged from 200 Euros to 400 Euros and averaged 260 Euros. It was only in July when some lots reached almost 1.000 Euros. The 119 identified trades make the Ardbeg 8yo (Committee Release) the second most “liquid” whisky of the month. It is now selling for around 100 Euros. This trio, completed by the recently released Macallan Harmony Collection (Rich Cacao), appeared for the first time on auctions and achieved around 400 Euros on average.

Like every month, do not forget to recheck the latest price changes in your whisky collection.

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.