When a rare bottle of Scotch whisky sold for US$2.7 million in November 2023, I was stunned, but I wasn’t surprised. The whiskey market has been booming for some time. Bourbon brands like Pappy Van Winkle from Buffalo Trace distillery are selling for astronomical prices in the secondary market . Japanese whiskies , which have become popular over the past decade, now fetch prices up to 50 times higher what they did a decade ago . And in July 2022, a single Ardbeg whisky barrel, aged since 1975, with enough liquid for about 500 bottles, sold at auction for around $19 million . In 1997, the entire Ardbeg distillery had been purchased by Glenmorangie Distillery for roughly $11 million . How could a single cask of Scotch whisky sell for nearly twice the value of an entire distillery purchased just over two decades earlier? I’ve been studying specialty markets for a decade, and I see at least two stories to unpack. One is economic, where items in low supply, like rare bottles or barrels, s...
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