Legendary Port Ellen accounts for some of the most sought after whiskies of all time. This article takes a closer look at this iconic Islay distillery’s secondary market track record. Here is our market portrait of Port Ellen.

When it comes to whisky collecting favourites, Port Ellen is among the top-ranked brands. Closed in 1983, some of its releases set early trends and were the key drivers of the market as we know it today. While there are plenty of resources out there which will tell you everything you need to know about the history and top-rated releases, we are focusing on the performance of Port Ellen in the auction market we observe.

Our ever-growing whisky database currently contains 10.680 price observations belonging to 787 different Port Ellen bottlings. In the below chart, we visualise the monthly trades, the three-month moving average and the median price since January 2015.

Since late 2016 the number of traded Port Ellens constantly lies between 100 and 200 bottles each month, and we see that the prices have increased quite significantly. In early 2015 a Port Ellen release traded for around 700 Euros on average. Fifty per cent of the trades (including all bottle types and sizes) were below 500 Euros. In early 2019 the average price per bottle increased to almost 1.300 Euros. But we also observed periods in which prices stabilised or decreased slightly, such as 2016 until late 2017, and in 2018.

The Market Performance

As mean and median prices depend on which releases were traded, we look at our market indices. These indices describe the monthly gains or losses in value of the most traded bottles. We start by comparing our Port Ellen distillery index to the Islay region index and our overall Whiskystats Whisky Index.

Port Ellen used to be the key driver of our Islay region index as the respective indices strongly correlated until the mid of 2018. This is not surprising since Port Ellen is the most collectable Islay whisky brand. However, things changed in 2018. Our Islay index performed extraordinarily well, while Port Ellen could not keep pace. In our Price Update for May 2019, we identified Ardbeg and Bowmore as the critical drivers of these movements.

We compared the major silent distilleries on the secondary whisky market in the chart above. Here we see Port Ellen releases experienced very stable value gains from 2013 until mid of 2016. The same was true for Brora and Rosebank. While the most traded Rosebank releases continued this growth and even increased the index gains, both Brora and Port Ellen lost ground. This means that Rosebank overtook Karuizawa and Macallan in our distillery ranking, while Port Ellen is currently fighting to stay within the Top 10.

And finally, we also compare the market performance of original and independent Port Ellen bottlings. Interestingly, the independent bottlings experienced far more stable value gains while some of the original bottlings dramatically gained and lost in value within short periods. Nevertheless, over the past six years, both the most traded original and independent bottlings gained more than 250% in value.

The Average Port Ellen

Here is a fun fact. The average Port Ellen release traded on auctions was distilled in 1980 and bottled in 2005 (consequently 25 years old). It also contains 54,9% of alcohol, and 3.350 bottles were released without any cask or batch information stated on the label. We do not find any actual releases that would match this “average Port Ellen”. However, our Whisky Pricing Machine suggests that such a release would be worth around 1.500 Euros at the moment.

Annual Releases

When we talk about Port Ellen, we also need to mention the Annual Releases issued by Diageo. You find all of the 17 releases in our database. The currently most expensive one is the 16th release. It traded for almost 2.800 Euros in May 2019. The release with the highest increase in value is release number 8. It once traded for as little as 275 Euros. In early 2019, prices are rapidly approaching the 2.000 Euro threshold.

The whole set of Port Ellen Annual Releases will cost you around 35.000 Euros if you buy it bottle by bottle. The Annual Releases gained more than 100% in auctions. The cheapest (standard-bottle sized) is currently the 2nd release which traded for 1.500 Euros in May 2019.

The Standout Releases

Finally, we want to point out some specific Port Ellen releases which experienced quite interesting price movements. Here we want to start with those bottles that realised the highest value gains on the secondary market. Two of them belong to the Annual Release range mentioned above. The 6th Annual Release once traded for 300 Euros and now sells for more than 1.600 Euros. The 200 ml version of the 7th Release increased from 80 Euros to now 500 Euros. The Port Ellen 21yo (1982) Old Malt Cask bottled by Douglas Laing is the highest value gainer in auctions. 150 Euros in July 2011 and 1.100 Euros in September 2018, which equals a 630% increase in value over seven years.

Among the currently most expensive Port Ellen bottlings, we find the Port Ellen 10yo (1981) Samaroli. In October 2018, this whisky sold for more than 10.000 Euros on WhiskyAuctioneer.com. Also not particularly cheap is the Port Ellen 15yo (1969) bottled by Gordon & MacPhail. In February 2018, one of these bottles achieved 14.500 Euros, but in March 2019, prices dropped to 7.000 Euros. The same is true for the Port Ellen 12yo bottled by James MacArthur. In the first half of 2018, prices went as high as 16.000 Euros but then dropped to 10.000 Euros.

Since the original distillery was closed, the future Port Ellens that have not been released will continue to age. At the moment, the Port Ellen 2018 Release, which was distilled in 1978 and bottled in 2018, is the oldest Port Ellen in our database. It only recently appeared on the auction platforms we track and trades for around 6.000 Euros. With 37 years of maturation, the 16th and 17th Annual Releases belong to the second oldest releases, together with the 241 bottles of Port Ellen 37yo (1979) issued by Goren’s Whisky Distillery Ltd. So it won’t be very long until the first Port Ellen 40+yo appears on the market.

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.