Whisky Online Blog

What is the value of whisky to you? There is much talk of whisky speculation, investment, expanding markets, developing markets, collecting, consumption, branding and super-premium these days. Is it a coincidence that it all seems to have come at a time when I’ve just started a new job in a relatively youthful auction house? Or is my position a symptom of circumstance or, worse still, the ‘market’? I know for a fact that my job exists because its existence facilitates profit. We talk a lot about value these days. I see all the rants, raves and comments about it coagulating like puddles on the shores of social media. I hear it when I speak to the retailers. Margins, allocations and profits are getting tighter and tighter, the auctioneers are winning and the retailers are fighting up hill. Is this all because there is less and less of the old stuff to go around, the juicy old bottles that everyone wants. The spiraling auction prices and the increasing feeling that the old bottles and new releases are two separate worlds would seem to suggest so.

The star bottles in our latest auction. How many of us can now afford to obtain, let alone open, bottles such as these?

But there is a bigger picture here I think. All this increasing talk of value or perception of value seems indicative of a trending change in the way many of us think about whisky. How many of us can now afford to open old 1960s Laphroaigs or 1950s Macallans? These bottles have become tokens, they are symbolic of their perceived worth, in short, they are currency. Ten years ago there was McTears in Glasgow, they held whisky auctions no more than four times a year. Christie’s and Sotheby’s did fine wine auctions but that is something still far divorced from whisky in terms of the truly astronomical prices and quantities, it was then and it still is. Now we have the online specialist aucitoneers Whisky Auction, Scotch Whisky Auctions and more on the horizon no doubt. We have McTears (now on ten auctions a year), Bonhams and, most recently, Mulberry Bank Auctions, where I work. There will almost certainly be further additions to this list in the next year and I haven’t even mentioned all the smaller auction houses in Britain that do occasional whisky auctions or specialist sections of larger auctions dedicated to whisky. There has been an explosion of whisky at auction over the past decade, in both prices achieved and quantity sold. But what does it all mean?

One of the best illustrations of why whisky has value is Ardbeg Manager's Dram. Bottled in 1999 it was a single cask of astonishing quality and character. The bottles were practically given away at £69 a piece. Now enough people want one of these incredible bottles that the price is nudging £2000 a pop.

With straightforward analysis it means that the desire to drink great whisky, coupled with the cumulative effect of three decades worth of cheap to fairly priced, good to outstanding quality whiskies being steadily released around the world, has created a huge demand and an ever dwindling supply. Their inevitable consumption means there are more people who want to hoard/collect and drink than there are bottles left to satisfy these demands. It also means there are many people who kept or own these bottles, for whatever reason, and are increasingly persuaded to part with them, almost always because they seem too valuable to justify keeping. Or they were keen eyed enough to spot an opportunity and played it with an eye to raw investment. The bottom line is money has the power to exert influence over our perceptions of what something is for and what we are willing to do with it. I swore I would never part with the small selection of very special bottles I had gathered throughout the previous decade, but then in 2010 I had an overdraft and I badly wanted to go traveling . Needless to say I soon found out that I wasn’t so attached to them after all, I could no longer justify sitting on several thousand pounds worth of bottled liquid. Do I miss those bottles? No, not really, one or two that were unique and I’ll never see again, but I’ve been fortunate enough to taste most of them already in my lifetime and I’ll taste many more great drams so I don’t feel too precious about it. But the point is they evolved in my mind from potential bottled memories and stored olfactory beauty into the achievable fantasy of black ink on my bank statement instead of red and a few more stamps in my passport.

Unlike Whisky, it's impossible to put a price on the best experiences in your life. After the time I had in South America I'll never regret selling my bottles for a second.

People rant and rave about whisky being for drinking a lot these days, it is the understandable and ill informed reaction to the many discussions about collecting/investing/speculating (call it what you will). People seem awfully proud to blurt out their philosophy that ‘Whisky is for drinking not for collecting’ every time they hear of a bottle being stored in a dark cupboard rather than immediately cracked open with pristine abandon while the cork burns in the fire. Of course whisky is for drinking, it is after all a drink, that is the very reason these bottles are expensive. Forget the artificially expensive Dalmore (insert ludicrous latin name here) for a minute, these are different beasts altogether. I’m talking about the vast majority of older bottles and the more desirable, modern independent bottlings, these whiskies acquire great expense because people want to own and drink them (because word spread out from the many that already have). The number of people acquiring them for purely monetary purposes is nothing like the number of people who want to keep them with a view to one day drinking them.

There are more of these old bottles getting opened than you might imagine. That's another reason for their ever increasing value. (And yes I know it's a Cognac but give me a break.)

However, if you’ll allow me to play Devil’s advocate to myself for a moment there is a flip side. Whisky is for drinking. I come back to my original question, what is the value of whisky to you? Is it a drink that stokes the fires of great company and friendship? Is it grease to the cogs of late night imagination? Is it the ink that outlines and shades your greatest and darkest memories? Is it a liquid bound up in tears and laughter, one that toasts the fortunes and mourns the people and joys that happenstance cuts out of your life? This is where our passion for whisky often lies, it is born in the avenues of surprise and exploration and it is a glorious journey. But we are changing, these perceptions are being all too often forgotten and swept away in the face of the behemoth of money and its sticky fingers that latch onto every corner of our lives. We have made an enemy of our own passions. ‘Whisky’ is now an industry with sub-markets, markets forged by the very love we feel for the drink that started us on this journey in the first place. The prices now paid for the great bottlings are a measure of the length to which we are willing to go for our love of ‘the hard stuff’. At the end of the day these prices are paid because there are more than enough people with the money and the will to pay it who want these whiskies. The same money and keen willpower that has fired this expanding market for rare and desirable bottles.

When we speak of wine nowadays it suffers from an image of middle-class, Guardian-reading, bourgeois association. It is linked with wealth, food matching, Michelin stars and snobbery. The mainstream press chooses to forget in these instances (whenever it suits them) the vast quantities of people who nightly chastise their innards with litres of putrid Blossom Hill swill. The predominant and popular image is of finery and privilege. A shame that, amongst these two ends of the spectrum, is often lost the truth that wine was, and often remains, a grassroots, agricultural industry. One that requires great skill and offers simple and delicious reward beyond the obvious financial return. Wine’s rustic origins and proud role in the history of human decadence, zest for life and earned indulgence is often lost or forgotten amidst a global industry hell bent on image, price control and premium products aimed at premium clientele. Whisky it seems, in this sense, is not far behind. The only difference is whisky will never be as big as wine. The idea that a case of old whisky, even something like Malt Mill (God willing!) would match the price at auction of a case of 1870 Latour (if one should ever come up for sale), is somewhat ludicrous. Whisky is acting bigger than it is, and therefore it feels like it is bursting at the seems a little bit. It makes you wonder how much longer these markets can sustain themselves. How much higher in price can these top end Ardbegs and Port Ellens go? Whisky as an industry has always had its big ups and very big downs. It has also quite noticeably always failed to learn from its own history. Probably something to do with it being a long term product that requires great age and, as a result, the people that sell it are often replaced every ten-twenty years with a new set of people with big wide dollar signs in their eyes, all looking straight ahead into developing markets and never glancing over their shoulder to what has gone before. This specialist and rare whisky market is still a relatively new beast, I wonder how long before it, like the the rest of the industry at large has several times already, takes its first tumble? Is it just me or does it feel like we’re in those slow, steep, up-hill moments before the roller-coaster plunges…

A visual history of the Whisky industry.

I know that we all love whisky, with great passion. All this social media debating and all these blogs (including this one) wouldn’t exist without that love. I’ll be honest right now and say I’m not a fan of capitalism and the vast profiteering its structures can facilitate, despite the obvious fact that I am one of many who has undeniably reaped more than my fair share of its spoils over the years in the guise of privilege. With this in mind I have often struggled to reconcile my love of an increasingly expensive drink and the money I’ve paid for it on many an occasion, with the vastly unfair distribution of wealth on this planet. I suppose my musings today have been largely driven by these internal conflicts. Whatever it is, I am increasingly having to remind myself that whisky is, first and foremost, a source of joy, along with art, music, love, sex, films, expression, adventure, exercise, food of greater extravagance than is considered essential, literature and general festivities. These are the apps of life, not just to alleviate pain but to actively provide joy and decadence, to make life worth living. We have an abundance of them here in the west which is partly why so many of us are curdled by gnawing guilt. But the fact is we have them and we should not be ashamed to enjoy them so long as we appreciate our incredible good fortune to have them. I’m just sad to see that whisky is being transported ever upwards and away from these more humble spheres into realms where it is often all too easy to forget (or just to fucking expensive to remember) why we truly love it.

So, what is the value of whisky to you?

Silent beauty and picturesque, empty ancient cottages.

Back in 2007 when I was finishing my degree in Film Studies at Glasgow University I took a module entitled ‘Scotland On Film & TV’. Our tutor designed the course around the theme of Scotland’s presentation through film. Its structured visual delivery to the spectator that had come to be little more than the spoon-feeding of scenery to hungry urban eyes the world over. Scotland’s landscape was one of feminine beauty, rolling hills, silent glens with solitary and majestic stags strutting proud. It wasn’t a Scotland of the cailyard, nor was it shortbread tin tartanry. It was something else, it was landscape as ornament. Take time to look at any number of adverts, films, tv series, music videos or tourism campaigns shot in Scotland over the past fifty years and there is a distinct trend to view the landscape as wallpaper, a drape at which to point a camera and admire from a distance. This is not the Scotland of fank, mire, bog and drizzle. It avoids the world’s greatest palate of grey that is the Scottish wilderness, the greens are vibrant and gentle, not dulcet and shrouded. Stone cottages are pretty rather than the cinders of butchered culture. There is no sense of life hacked out of an unforgiving, cold and relentless environment. The shorelines are postcards not fishing ports, the villages quaint not fragile or remnant and hills or moors are open, bountiful wilderness, not achingly silent plains stripped of the forests that fuelled empire and industry and emptied of their population. It is a wilderness of endless beauty, one where the people come to visit, not one where its inhabitants were forcibly distilled away to distant shores. While this trend is being aggressively bucked by excellent modern Scottish films such as Morvern Callar and Red Road, films that bring the landscape and cities back sharply into the foreground as inescapable parts of Scottish life. This process of ‘ornamentation’ is the new cailyard, the modern construct of Scotland, one that whisky is entangled in in strange and guilty ways.

The majority of people’s whisky knowledge begins with a blurb, the back of a bottle, the masticated regurgitation of a marketing office somewhere far from the distillery. It often contains any number of phrases ‘cool, soft, clear, natural, plentiful, highland, spring, river, water, Atlantic, peat, coastal, ancient, nestled, forest, glen, gentle, rolling, stunning…’ the list goes on, sound familiar? Whisky has for so long become valuable enough to require an identity, a construct like that of the landscape that is used to ‘sell’ Scotland around the world, whether it be explicitly or indirectly. Whisky has been put forth as the product of a landscape, an artefact born of place and the good grace of nature. The end of this logical path is the wine-gifted buzzword ‘terroir’, a word that whisky is increasingly growing to love. The idea that it is a product of the land is a popular one and not without merit but whisky is a spirit with bite and its influence is more convoluted than we’d like to think.

The Laphroaig back label is always a classic for this kind of overtly romanticised imagery.

Whisky is an industry, one made possible by the land in which it is made but one that has also had to influence change on the landscape itself in order to survive. The commercial distilleries that grew out of the legal overhauls of the early 1800s made money and fast, that money helped lay the fabric of Scotland’s early railway lines, it increased shipping commerce and port activity, they necessitated a re-carving of the land itself, further deforestation, the developments of new roads, new community flagships were born in the shape of distilleries. In the days when a small, two-still distillery like Ardbeg provided at least sixty jobs and a thriving local community of two hundred people, the larger distilleries all over Scotland were powerful epicentres of community.

The Scottish landscape was for so long a harsh master, it provided but it was a lifetime of give and take, for every meal it gave a family it chilled them to the bone, soaked them and muddied their fields. The inhabitants of Scotland in the fledgling years of commercial distilling were not scenery addicts, to them the landscape was hands in freezing water, it was knowing the touch of seaweed, the ache in the limbs wrought by steep hills with wind worn clothes and skin. This was the character of the people that made Scottish whisky for so long and these were their trials. Perhaps the greatest influence of the landscape on whisky has always been one of osmosis, by transfer between the people that were raised by the land and who eventually set their hands to whisky making. In return whisky played its role in the ultimate taming of the land, the industrialisation and domestication of Scotland. Scotland is now a relatively comfortable place to exist, its scenery rarely exerts so great a pressure over the inhabitants or inflicts discomfort, only mild frustration and inconvenience in the form of rain and occasional landslides. The landscape is now enjoyed rather than endured, it is a place of outstanding natural beauty, its practicality and necessity forgotten by most and unknown by many.

Scotland's wilderness these days plays host to golf, luxury castle hotels and distillery tours.

Interesting then that just as our relationship to the landscape as a culture over recent decades has changed and been tamed so too has the character of Scottish whisky. Stills and kiln fires are no longer tended by men of questionable sobriety. Barley is no longer turned by hand. Fermenting wash is no longer left to fester in wooden washbacks for up to a week due to slower production. Casks are no longer repaired or coopered on site, large workforces are gone and in their place is the cold, relentless efficiency of automation. Distilleries are filled with the absence of voices, the trembling clicks and clacks of consoles and computers have replaced footsteps and chatter. We live in a stunning but deeply man moulded landscape drinking whisky made by fewer and fewer people and their human mistakes, ticks of technique and quirks of style.

The clinical might of Roseisle Distillery stands a proud testament to the pinnacle of modern Scottish distilling. A cold monster, doubtlessly of unending consistency, a feat of distilling science that is undeniably impressive.

The quality of Scottish whisky is globally quite excellent these days. The German and Scottish independents bring us many great and obscure casks while the majority of distilleries are emerging from the teething problems of modernisation that so many experienced in the 1980s. Most now release excellent mature stock from the 1990s and 2000s. In many ways these are good times for whisky drinkers, but the quirk has gone. The blurbs still speak of babbling burns and sea lashed warehouses, they still speak of the ‘people’ while employing less and less of them on the front lines of production and they still speak of their spirits as if they have remained unchanged for decades. Nothing could be further from the truth. The whiskies of Scotland have changed and done so in close step with the people who live there and make it. The influence of the landscape on whisky is no fairy tale of terroir and mystique. It is a tale of constant give and take, instigated and moderated by the people between them, an ever evolving story that goes through periods of rest, warfare and uneasy peace. Just as whisky necessitated physical change in the parts of the landscape so too the landscape provided and moulded the very real and human folk that would make the whiskies, whiskies that for so long reeked of character, they weren’t always good but they were never boring. Now both whisky and people have seemingly outgrown and escaped the landscape from which they came. That landscape which is now an ornament on our tv screens and scribbles on our bottles.

If you spend your time spiraling in whisky circles, which, if you’re reading this blog, I suspect you do, then you’ll probably be familiar with the modern and unwritten law of whisky-themed social and business interactions. I speak of course about one-upmanship, the never-ending and unspoken quest to outdo each other in the knowledge stakes. I know many people who, upon entering a room in some kind of whisky situation, feel obliged to subtly make everyone else aware that they know more about whisky than anyone else in that room. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about, you’re probably guilty, as am I, of having competed yourself at one point or another. I know there have been times when I’ve over asserted myself and my ideas, I’m also sure there are parallels in all facets and walks of life. It’s just that it seems particularly viral in the whiskysphere.

This is the 'actual' whiskysphere where we all live.

I was always aware of these issues but it’s not since coming to work in an auction house in recent months that I’ve become increasingly demoralised by them. This is a line of work that keeps me constantly involved in the antique and collectable side of whisky and, therefore, the murky, digitised underworld of geekery that it entails. This is a place where the trend has been allowed to run wild in recent times. A place where facts are no longer harmlessly gathered, they are stockpiled like ammunition, ready to be loaded into the weaponry of knowledge and unleashed on other whisky mercenaries. Bottles are ticked off like a scorecard, ‘Oh! You haven’t tried that one. Oh god it’s incredible.’ This kind of attitude seems to be boiling away more and more feverishly these days. Whether I’m in my office at the auction house greeting someone or out viewing bottles, I will often be chatting away with someone about whisky and that old familiar tone of mild condescension will raise its head. It might be as simple as looking at a particular bottle and saying something along the lines of ‘Of course that one is interesting because of… (insert hyper-obscure factoid here)’. Whether I know this or not is irrelevant, it’s the burbling undercurrent of wanting to appear more knowledgeable that gets me. I didn’t realise quite how bad it was till I started this job and it’s something that I’ve since made a big effort never to never again do myself. It suddenly seems like a lot of needless effort, to constantly be switched on, actively seeking an opportunity to surreptitiously show off. It becomes quite tiresome, you end up loosing sight of why you, and anyone else present, is standing there in the first place, a shared passion, not a shared competition.

So why does it exist? Where do these oddly sad and competitive streaks come from? Is it something to do with whisky or with booze in general? I’m sure it exists in wine circles but I have never experienced it to the same degree, perhaps I’m not deep down enough into the geekery. It seems to be a very whisky-centric thing. Of course it’s not all bad. I wouldn’t be here typing this or doing the job I do if whisky and its wonderful followers weren’t a great source of joy in my life, but it’s because I love it so that this knowledge stealth warfare gets me, it spoils things. The majority of people are not too bad, it’s more the ones who are chronic with it, the people who can’t help but turn every conversation into a mini lecture, not a debate or a friendly argument but a single sided diatribe. It can be quite bewildering to come out of the other side of such instances and think back on what was discussed and said and realise it all revolved around something so inconsequential as the temperature of the 2nd mash water at Dailuaine, or something equally obscure.

Maybe it exists because whisky is all too easily the refuge of the nerd, the completist, the collector, the cataloguer and hoarder of facts and measures. I never quite understood that angle myself, I don’t really know many facts about whisky if I’m honest, I was always more interested in building and developing an understanding of whisky than a knowledge of it. I can’t tell you what the temperature of the 2nd mash water at Dailuaine is but I could probably tell you, as could many whisky lovers, why it is that temperature and what effect it might or might not have on the final character of the distillate.

We are here, at our festivals, on our blogs, our forums, our distilleries, our bars and our tastings because the bottom line is that we have found something of nourishment or inspiration in whisky as a drink. Something we feel compelled to share and communicate to other people we care about. That is the clear power of whisky in the digital age of instant communication. In most instances this competitive streak probably arises out of a mixture of an honest desire to share our acquired knowledge and a willful push to banish misinformation and enhance the education of those around us. It’s just at its most extreme edge, the pace where it becomes tiresome and unpleasant, the conversation where you start to wonder why this person bothered turning up at all. Was their mission to get out of bed that day and take pity on all the wretched souls who don’t know as much about whisky as they do? Who knows, all I know is that it is something that unfortunately exists in whisky society and if we all made an effort to be less confrontational with our knowledge then the better it would be. It’s only whisky at the end of the day, we love it, it fulfills our lives in many great ways, but it doesn’t matter how much you know about it. It matters that you love it and that you share it.