The Feis Ile 2017 bottlings reached the Whiskystats database. Meanwhile, Bowmore made its way to the top 10 of our distillery ranking. Better late then never, here is our price update for July 2017!
The price observations from July 2017 come from ScotchWhiskyAuctions.com (SW) and Bonhams Edinburgh (BHE). WhiskyAuction.com was on holiday last month. In total we added 2.645 prices to our whisky database. While Macallan (245 trades) and Ardbeg (186) were of course the most traded distilleries, Highland Park reached the third place in this respect with 185 trades.
The Whiskystats Whisky Index (WWI) barely moved this month. After this index, which describes the value development of the currently 300 most traded whiskies, reached it´s peak last month, it now recided at around 340 index points. In the year of 2017 the worth of the 300 included single malt whiskies climbed by 7,3%.
The value of our hand-selected Fabulous 50 collection also reached a new all-time peak. This fifty whiskies, which represent a selection of regularly traded and highly collectable single malts, is now worth more than 95.000 Euros. Partly responsible for this increase is, among others, the Macallan Single Cask 1580 Private Eye bottling. It´s July prices averaged to 3.690 Euros which is 400 Euros more than in June 2017.
Feis Ile 2017
The annual Islay Festival took place at the end of May. For this occasion, the Islay based distilleries issue special bottlings. Since most of those “Feis Ile” bottlings are limited collector releases, it is of no surprise that they go to auctions right away. Since we wait for two price observations before we add a whisky to our database, it is now, two months after the Feis Ile 2017, that these bottlings reached Whiskystats.
By the time of writing these lines you will find 13 different Feis Ile 2017 bottlings on Whiskystats (simply type “feis ile 2017” in the search bar of our database). The most expensive one is the Bowmore 27yo (1990) Port Cask. There only exist 200 bottles of this Bowmore. Nevertheless, in the last two months we observed 10 trades. The average price was 986 Euros.
The Feis Ile 2017 bottlings also dominated the list of the most traded whiskies of the month. The single most traded bottle is the Lagavulin 16yo Feis Ile 2017 bottling. In July alone we observed 32 trades.
Second most traded whisky of the month is the Bowmore 11yo Feis Ile 2017 bottling. In June and July 61 of the existing 2.000 bottles were traded on the platforms we track. The prices averaged to around 120 Euros per bottle.
Bowmore
A quick look at our monthly updated distillery ranking shows that Bowmore jumped up the ladder by three places to now sit at the 9th place. Our Bowmore index, which describes the historic price development of the currently 100 most traded Bowmore bottlings, experienced a 8,5% increase in July alone!
Naturally we wonder what the reason for this could be. As we added price observations from Bonhams, this could be a good starting point to look out. And sure enough, there we find the Black Bowmore 31yo (1964) Final Edition and the Black Bowmore 36yo (1964).
The Black Bowmore 36yo (1964) is traded solely at Bonhams and there predominantely in Edinburgh since we only have one price observation from Hong Kong. The latest price observations we had come from December 2016 and were somewhere around 10.000 Euros. In this month, one of the 2.000 once existing bottles sold for 13.000 Euros.
Similarly, the two trades for the Black Bowmore 31yo (1964) Final Edition averaged to 13.440 Euros. Unlike the above Black Bowmore 36yo (1964), the “Final Edition” is traded across all platforms. Only last month, we observed a trade at WhiskyAuction.com for 8.000 Euros.
Put together this massive price increases for this two Black Bowmores and the fact that they have a significant weight in our Bowmore index due to their high prices, and we found the major reason for the observed index-jump.
We hope you found this short summary enlightening. As always, do not forget to check if the values of the whiskies in your personal collections did change!