2024 Has Been a Turbulent Year for Vintage Whisky Auctions

This year has been particularly challenging for sellers in the rare whisky space, with both the volume of whisky sold and the amount in question showing significant declines year over year. That’s one of the big takeaways from the 2024 edition of the Noble & Co Annual Whisky Intelligence Report — a detailed look at the state of the industry that charts the ups and downs of the market.

What else can be gleaned from it? Well, if you’re looking to sell a rare bottle of The Macallan, you may be in luck: the report notes that it is “the most popular of the secondary market” despite showing a drop in sales this year. Precisely where those drops took place was also significant: Noble & Co pointed out that some of the biggest declines came from sales of bottles priced between £1,000 and £10,000. Both the volume and price of sales in that category saw drops of over 30%.

More unsettling was Noble & Co’s discovery that the drops in both volume and price this year have been interconnected, with the former leading into the latter. “[T]he rate of decline is accelerating,” the firm notes — an especially sobering note, even in this context.

One expert cited in the report suggested that the secondary market is also reflecting pricing trends in the primary market. “Anything bought within the last probably five years is a difficult proposition to try and sell at auction,” Jonny Fowle, Sotheby’s Global Head of Whisky, told Noble & Co. “If you bought something in 2020 to 2023, the likelihood is you’ve overpaid.”

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Fowle went on to criticize the more speculative elements of whisky buying. “Currently, we see a market in which people buy high-priced things on speculation that the high price will get even higher,” he explained. “And so it just sits on the shelves, and no one really engages with the product itself.” All of which suggests a return to a central principle is in order: taste, not scarcity, needs to be paramount.