If 2023 was the year that single malt whisky hit a memorable high, then 2025 might well be remembered as the year the wheels fell off.
Single malts have always been the most expensive expressions of whisk(e)y, and the levels of price they managed to achieve in recent years is a testament to both how rare older spirits are and how good their marketers have become in parting lovers of uisgebaugh from their cash.
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Rarity is a common theme among distillers. Somehow, they all seem to find a "lost" barrel of 60-something-year-old spirit down the back of the metaphorical sofa, which can then be bottled in a hugely expensive container and confidently offloaded onto a thirsty market.
It's hard to really blame distillers for wanting to cash in. After all, single-malt Scotch is a hard product to make well, and it is also a ruinously expensive one; storing the spirit for 10 or more years means a very delayed return on investment for the producer, and every year sees a goodly chunk disappearing into the ether via evaporation.
So launching a limited-release whisky can be a lifeline for a distillery. The problem is that it looks like fewer people are willing to simply cough the inordinate sums that have been increasingly demanded for these rare beasts.
Over the past decade or so, distilleries have been in a kind of arms race when it comes to limited-release whiskies. Balvenie, Highland Park, Bowmore and – the daddy of them all – Macallan have released whiskies with eye-wateringly high prices to a thirsty market.
Those unicorn releases showed one hell of a halo effect, dragging up whisky prices generally, and – for good or ill – creating an entire industry based on investing in barrels of single malt. Some of those particular Ponzi schemes are still going, but far too many have folded their tents and disappeared into the night, often with sackloads of investor cash.
But the previously worry-free ascent of collectible single malts seems to have hit a rough patch of road. Recent hard times have impacted how large the market for luxury whisky is – and how much they are willing to pay, as we shall see when we look at our list of the most expensive single malts in the world.
The criteria for this series are pretty basic: as long as there are more than a couple of offers for a whisky, they are ranked according to their global average retail price, or GARP. This doesn't mean that your closest stockist will have the malt at the quoted price, but globally it's what you might expect to pay for it. Let's take a look.
First up, let's take a moment to nod appreciatively at Macallan's expensive whisky game; these guys are relentless when it comes to discovering one of those forgotten barrels. However, it seems it's no longer enough to simply fill a bespoke Lalique decanter with a very old Speyside whisky – there have been some fascinating price changes over the past couple of years.
The standout performance has been the 62-year-old Lalique bottling, which managed to raise its GARP from a relatively modest $119,723 last year to a whopping $204,377 today. That's a ridiculous performance, appreciating by 70-odd percent in the space of a year. The other upward trend was the Macallan Anniversary bottling, which managed to hike its GARP by $13,000, or a rather more demure 8 percent.
Beyond that, the picture is a little less cosy. Apart from the Space and Time bottling, which only hit the market this year and will bear some keen observation over the next 12 months, everything else from the famous Craigellachie distillery is heading south. And they're not dropping gradually either – the smallest drop is the Lalique VI bottling, which dropped by $13,500.
The others dropped by substantially more. The Lalique 57-year-old fell by $42,000 a bottle, while the Reach bottling dropped by more than $47,000. The 55-year-old Lalique bottling had a sobering depreciation of $75,000, while the Macallan Red Collection bottling dropped by more than many people have spent on an apartment – $149,143.
Beyond Macallan, even the Gordon & McPhail bottling of an 80-year-old Glenlivet took a $6000 hit, although it's still sitting relatively pretty with an average price tag of more than $125,000. But we really need to talk about the 55-year-old Yamazaki.
This whisky was launched at the kind of price level that goes so far beyond "super-premium" that it isn't even a speck in the rear-view mirror. The million-dollar malt once proudly held a GARP of $1,019,886 back in 2020, but went into a steady decline that has gained quite a bit of momentum in the past two years.
By August 2023, it was still leading the pack at more than $804,000, but had collapsed to $560,000 by the same time last year. Today it sits at a shade less than $416,000, or almost $145,000 less than last year – a drop of around 20 percent.
While the Macallan Space and Time is worth keeping an eye on, perhaps the Yamazaki will be the most interesting bottle to watch. There is less of it available now than there was two years ago, so it will be worth watching whether or not the market will continue to push the price down, even as the amount of actual whisky gradually evaporates.
Only time will tell.
