A bit of fun buying a bottle of whisky

Tax_Slave

We used to go to Europe mainland for holidays 4 times a year in the 90’s and I always picked up a bottle of whisky (1 litre)min duty free and never paid more than £30 ever.
Roll onto 2016 and time to move house. I have 30 bottles of unopened malt and I sent them to auction.
They all sold for what I thought was good money and then it came to final lot , the bottle in the least inspiring box and a common name I had heard of …if I had to choose one to give as a gift it would have been this one …
bidding started at £600 😳 and it sold for £1000 plus commission !
it was a McCallan 10 year old from 1980.
I almost fell off my chair in auction room 😂

pecunianonolet

Market is down massively for that category we're talking about. Buying anything from a distillery, which is not very established or known is like buying Queen Margot in Lidl. Not worth the effort and as others said, you bought a label. The packaging is probably worth more than the content. The market is pretty much saturated and prices charged for new releases have reached a level, far too high, inflated I would say. Just like the property market.

The times, when you could buy to "reasonable" prices bottles from rare, closed, unique distilleries with established brand names and reputation of unique character are over and in particular Scotch is losing it's fame nowadays. I remember buying a bottle of Signatory Brora for £110 (that was considered a price on the higher side in 2009), or a bottle of Rosebank Flora & Fauna for around £50, or Port Ellen for £200-300. Now all worth 10x or more. I drank a far few of those over time, had access to whiskies of very high age, etc. I bought and were gifted a fair few over the years, enough value that it would probably buy me a middle class car nowadays. Never sold a bottle, cracked a few ones open, some are kept for special moments and the rest, maybe one day is sold.

I have also seen private clients ordering bottles from the company I used to work for at $100k a pop and they ordered in cases or seen people arriving by private jet to see their own cask being bottled. 

My recommendation would be to crack that bottle open, enjoy a dram, share it with friends, make memories and that investment of the original price is going to be far more rewarding.

https://www.rarewhisky101.com/indices/distillery-specific-indices