From our Swindon correspondent:
From the BBC
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.
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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 of litres of spirit are warehoused every year. I don't know why. There is some cachet to having particularly old bottlings (though age at bottling is far more important than bottling date), especially in the far east. You'll see stupidly-priced and stupidly-old, as in 40 and 50 year old malts, at airports. All from the usual suspects, Macallan, Glenmorangie, Glenf*ddich. They're sold for the number on the label, not because that kind of aging improves things.