The Black Bowmore Final Edition is bouncing around, impacting our Bowmore and Fab50 indices. The overall market, however, seems to stabilize after its mid-2018 hiccup. Here is our price update for September 2018.
In September 2018, we observed no less than 8.842 trades at the auction houses we track. These price observations affected 4.474 whiskies in our database. With 285 bottles traded, Gordon & MacPhail was the most traded independent bottler. This is followed by the Scotch Malt Whisky Society (171), Signatory Vintage (158) and Cadenhead (154). The most-traded region was Speyside, with 2.976 trades. The least traded single malt region was the Lowlands, with only 240 trades. You can find all the stats in our Monthly Summary.
Top Trades
The most-traded whisky of this month was the Yamazaki 12yo Original Bottling. This Japanese single malt whisky traded no less than 64 times. The prices paid averaged around 132 Euros. From the price observations below, we see that prices went as high as 200 Euros in the last couple of months. It seems the bidders at WhiskyAuctioneer.com (orange dots) drove this development.
Also, a quite exciting price observation from WhiskyAuctioneer.com is the Springbank 21yo bottled by Samaroli. In the past, this whisky traded only at WhiskyAuction.com, with the last price observation coming in February 2015 for around 750 Euros. In September 2018, this bottle was traded for more than 4.500 Euros, which equals a 500% increase in value over a two and half year period.
We also find other quite impressive value gainers among this month’s trades. There is, for example, the Macallan 12yo (1989) bottled by Liquid Gold. Once available for around 50 Euros, this whisky is now selling for 400 Euros. And there is the Yamazaki 119.3 from the Scotch Malt Whisky Society. The last time we saw this whisky on auction was in May 2013, when it traded for 166 Euros. This month, also at WhiskyAuctioneer.com, the winning bid was around 1.300 Euros.
Major Index Movements
Now let’s take a look at our major market indices. There is the Whiskystats Whisky Index (WWI). This index is driven by the historically 500 most traded whiskies each month and represents our major market index. Those 500 bottles increased by 1% in value in September 2018. This moved our WWI to 207,34 index points, a new all-time peak. The upward trend is continuing after the WWI lost significantly earlier this year.
And then there are the Whiskystats Fabulous 50, a hand-selected collection of 50 iconic single malt bottlings. Last month we announced that our Fab50 collection is worth more than 120.000 Euros for the first time. This month we see that the value dropped to 118.000 Euros. So what happened?
On our Fab50 index site, we list all the bottles included in the index. For these bottles, we also list the latest price observations. This month one particular bottle stands apart. The Black Bowmore Final Edition traded for 11.000 Euros this month. This would be not much of a surprise since it traded in May also for 11.000 Euros. But in July 2018, someone paid more than 22.000 Euros. This extreme price observation probably affected our Bowmore distillery index, so let’s have a look.
Bowmore´s Drop and Ardbeg´s Rise
Looking at our Monthly Updated Distillery Ranking, we would like to make two interesting observations. First, there is the Ardbeg distillery. Since October 2017, our Ardbeg index has been on a steady rise. In September 2018 alone, the historically 100 most traded Ardbeg bottlings gained around 4,6% in value. During the last twelve months, the index increased by more than 45% to 214 index points. This brings Ardbeg into eighth place in our Top Ten distillery rankings.
On the other side is Bowmore. The historically 100 most traded Bowmore bottlings lost 8,5% in value in September 2018. We already know this is primarily due to the Black Bowmore Final Edition. But that is not the only Bowmore that lost value this month. The Bowmore Bicentenary Release traded for 3.300 Euros this month, 300 Euros less than in August. Similarly, the Bowmore 28yo (1983) Feis Ile 2011 bottling lost 200 Euros, and the Bowmore Mizunara Oak also dropped by 300 Euros.
Do not forget to check the latest 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.