Advice for Whisky Collectors and Beginners Part 1

I want to ask about the concierge service. Let’s say there’s someone in our audience and they’re looking to begin their whisky journey. What advice would you give?

I’d say if you’re looking to buy start with online auctions. There are about a dozen a month with several thousand bottles in each. Theres no retail overheads so you’re getting the best pricing. Now there are different strategies I’d recommend for if you want to drink it or collect it.

“There’s also quite a big argument that whiskies are to be drunk, if you can make a little money great, but it’s to be drunk.” 

For drinking it, I’ll use Macallan as an example. If you buy it you’re also paying for the marketing. Very successful marketing that means it’ll keep its value. But you can buy whiskies of a similar quality for half the price.

A Macallan 18 is £400, now you can buy a Glendronach 18 for £125 and they have very similar profiles. You could buy three for the price of one. If you’re drinking it you could keep two as an investment and drink one.

I’d also recommend following a distillery. For instance I’m a massive fan of Glenturret distillery. I’m trying to buy every reference they put out as an investment for my son. Currently I have about 60 of their references. A lot of the staff used to work at Macallan and it looks like they’re setting up a similar business model. I think there’s going to be good price appreciation.

The other thing I’d recommend if you’re looking to drink them is looking at independent bottlers. Some of the best whiskies I’ve tried are independently bottled. You get to try some really old single cask stuff and lessor known distilleries.

I Dr. James Espey is an industry legend and friend of mine, who said blends are more like watching an orchestra. Single malts are single notes, but blends are a composition. They’re designed to be drunk.

And you get some great value for money. At Le Clos we had our own brand 50 year old blend which we sold for £400-£500, but to give you reference a bottle of Macallan 55 year old would could about £75,000.

As a broker what sort relationships do you have to build with collectors?

 A lot of work is keeping people up to date with new arrivals. It’s about the personal relationships. People asking for specific things, how quickly can you get that to America etc.

It’s quite a closed group, it’s also self-policing. There are obviously issues with fakes and if anyone monkeys about they get found out very quickly. So within the community you have quite a lot of confidence in the stock.

Theres also collectors who will purchase whole collections and pull out the fakes and prevent recirculation. I knew a great collector whose sadly passed away recently Diego Sandrin who had one of the largest collections ever. I visited his collection a few times and he showed be a large cabinet full of fakes he’d removed from circulation.

How do you identify a fake in a collection?

For more recent editions its easier but for really old bottles that’s beyond my skill set and you’d get a specialist in. It’s a real science, they’ll say things like oh they wouldn’t have had that glass pigmentation when this was produced, they couldn’t emboss bottles like that at that time etc. I’ve seen a Cognac from the 1700’s which was distilled before bottling existed, so it was kept in a different container and transferred later. Its part forensics part investigative journalism.

The oldest whisky I’ve tried was from 1902 and there was controversy around that. It claimed to be  from 1902 and  it was bottled as a highland park, but there was some confusion around whether it really was Highland Park with the bottling claiming to be done by Berry brothers. Sometimes these “fakes” (if it is indeed) aren’t done with malice, it was just at the time they found a barrel in the warehouse and bottled it. So it could be an equally old and flavourful whisky, just bottled as something else.

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