Recently a cask of Ardbeg was reported to have sold for £16,000,000 – this is not the case though, and in the video Mark explains why.
We are generally conditioned to believe what the media reports is true. In this case the media were not technically wrong but without a full understanding of the costs involved the numbers look more impressive than they are.
When this story first broke, the previous record for a cask of whisky was £1million. Unsurprisingly then, this got us scratching our heads, how did the record jump so much so quickly?
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The answer lies in the costs that were all included as part of the sale.
There were about 440 bottles in the cask, an ex-sherry butt that was the result of a vatting of two smaller casks back in 2014. Importantly the details of the sale state that the owner is having the cask as 88 official bottles per year, and the £16million fee includes storage, bottling costs, taxes, duty, distillery visits and import costs as well as a £1million charity donation.
That £16million fee likely includes around £3million in UK taxes and duty. The buyer had remained anonymous other than being from Asia, but its important to remember that if they are from Hong Kong for example they will be subject to 100% import duty – that’s the extreme, but there are plenty of other countries where the bottles may be being imported that mean up to £8million of that cost may in fact be to cover import costs!
Therefore it is probably better to phrase is that £16million is not the price of the cask, it is the gross revenue generated from all of the bottles from that cask.
Putting the £16million Ardbeg cask into context
The Macallan Reach was released as an edition of 288 bottles, at £92,000 per bottle that gets you to £26,500,000 gross profit from the cask.
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The Glenlivet Generations 80 year old was £90,000 a bottle which makes £22,500,000 for the cask.
Even the Karuizawa Geisha’s work out around £9,000,000 for each cask and that is for a non-official bottling.
The key then is context and how data is produced. Cask prices are rarely reported as gross profit from the cask, so reporting it in this way makes it look more impressive than it is.
Even smaller non-single cask releases come up with impressive numbers when you break it down. The Macallan Distil Your World at £3,100 per bottle and 1,000 bottles works out as £3,100,000 gross sales, or the Folio 6 at just £299 a bottle and an edition of 3,000 gets you to just under £900,000. While the Springbank 30 year old at £865 and an edition of 1,400 gets to £1,200,000.
The prices above assume all sales are in the UK and therefore aren’t even including the import costs that were included in the Ardbeg cask sale.
Comparing it to other Ardbeg
£36,000 for a bottle of Ardbeg might sound expensive at first, but is it? Firstly its important to remember these are all bottled by Ardbeg, so they are official releases, and the first release at 46 years old is going to be the oldest Ardbeg ever released. Currently the oldest Ardbeg is a 40 year old Signatory Vintage release, which costs £10,000 for an independent bottling.
The Kingsbury’s 29 year old Ardbeg bottling goes for £25,000 at auction, and that’s before taxes have been paid (remember that’s a £50,000 bottle by the time it arrives in Hong Kong).
Suddenly £36,000 a bottle for the worlds oldest Ardbeg, officially bottled and including all taxes doesn’t sound unreasonable.
Of course, no PR agency would run the headline, “Rich Asian Buys 440 Bottles of the Worlds Oldest Ardbeg at a Cost Effective Price” it just doesn’t sell news.