A £25m round of drinks as whisky sales soar

IT is known as liquid gold on account of its colour and the incredible prices it can fetch.

Now whisky has lived up to its billing, for the UK’s rare whisky auction market has exceeded £25million in a year for the first time as worldwide demand soars.

Both the volume and value of rare whisky sold at auction increased by record amounts, according to a report.

Exports also soared to record levels last year with sales of £4.36billion, said whisky analyst and broker Rare Whisky 101 (RW101).

The value of collectable bottles of single malt whisky sold at auction in the UK rose by 76.33 per cent to a record £25.06million, smashing 2016’s figure of £14.21million.

The number of bottles of single malt sold at auction in Britain rose by 42.47 per cent to 83,713. The most expensive bottle to sell at auction was a 62-year-old Dalmore – one of 12 originally released – that went for £95,000.

The Apex 1000 Index – which tracks the best performing 1,000 bottles of rare whisky – closed the year up 27.51 per cent, said RW101’s leading index for rare whisky.

Whisky even outperformed share index Liv-Ex Fine Wine 100 at 5.28 per cent, the FTSE 100 at 7.63 per cent and gold bullion at 13.59 per cent.

In December alone 8,848 bottles – valued at £3.148million – of whisky sold at auction in the UK, a record month, a large proportion of the 25,123 bottles that sold through the final quarter of 2017. Yet only four years ago in 2013, a total of 20,211 bottles were sold throughout the full year while in 2012 the full year sales value of the drink totalled £2.911million.

By the end of 2016, ten distilleries had seen a single bottle sell at auction in the UK for more than £10,000, with last year’s figure rising to 14 bottles.

Andy Simpson, director of RW101, said: ‘The volume of bottles on the open market is at a record high but demand for the right bottles continues to exceed these record levels of supply.’

RW101 co-founder David Robertson said: ‘We are experiencing increasing demand from almost all parts of the globe.

‘South-East Asia remains a key factor for the market, but demand from the domestic market, central Europe and further afield is higher than we have ever seen.’

‘Increasing demand from all parts of the globe’