From our Swindon correspondent:
From the BBC
A man whose father gave him 18-year-old whisky every year for his birthday is selling the collection to buy a house.
Matthew Robson, from Taunton, was born in 1992 and over the course of his life his father Pete has spent about £5,000 on 28 bottles of Macallan single malt.
The collection is now worth more than £40,000 and has been put up for sale.
Well, no. The price being asked is £40,000. Whether it gets £40,000 is another matter.
Personally, I’m sceptical because whisky isn’t like wine, where the year has some bearing on the quality, and improves in the bottle. Whisky is distilled and once out of the barrel in the bottle, it stops ageing. It’s not even really sold on when it was bottled but how many years are in the barrel. If you taste Macallan 18 bottled last year and Macallan 18 bottled 10 years ago, it’s going to taste the same.
And if you look around the internet, you can find old bottled Macallans, but the price is generally £200-300/bottle. So, 28 bottles of Macallan is roughly around well, £5000. Still a better investment than Beanie Babies, but dropping the money in a tracker fund might have done a lot better over time.
Yes but a banana taped to the wall was sold for $120,000 or something. There’s one born every minute.
The Greater Fool does exist but it’s a mistake to base one’s investment strategy on him.
Mr. Swindon is right, it’s preposterous to assert that “The collection is now worth more than £40,000” because that’s the asking price for it. But it may be worth more than its cost. The selling price might not reflect the intrinsic worth of the product but its scarcity.
Well. Macallan is a bit strange as malts go. There are many whiskies that go up in price, some of them quite a lot, but mostly dead distilleries. I’ve enjoyed a number of bottles of Port Ellen in my life, but the last one was perhaps 5 years ago (and bought 5 years before that). I’m not sure I would want to pay for one now, with the cheapest expressions approaching a thousand quid. But Macallan, and a few of the other big and heavily-marketed malts (most of them distinctly run-of-the-mill), do appreciate after bottling, despite the fact that millions… Read more »