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Purchasing a cheap blend called Jim McEwan’s Symphony No 1
(which you can read a bit more about here and here) on a trip to Islay,
started me thinking about people who collect whisky. For me, having a whisky
collection is essential, but only from the perspective of wanting a selection
of whiskies to choose from whenever I want a drink (and perhaps to some extent
for the purpose of learning about whisky), but some people collect whisky for
other reasons.
Buying a new bottle of whisky is one of my favourite things
at the moment, which sounds a bit sad, so it would be a shame if I only allowed
myself to buy one at a time rather than maintaining my collection or allowing
it to grow (slightly). Given the amount that I’m learning about whisky, could I
put that learning and enjoyment to a more useful purpose, I wonder? That’s one
of the things I’ll be asking in this feature.
My main motivation in buying whisky is that I like to drink
whisky, and I want to know what they taste like – let’s say with a view to
experiencing the pinnacle of what distilled spirit can offer (for some reason –
why distilled spirit and not tea or something cheaper and non-alcoholic is a
question for another day). I don’t know yet if one day I’ll feel like I’ve
achieved that – presumably it is possible that I’ve already enjoyed a glass of
whisky more than I ever will again (it certainly feels that way from time to
time - and what is the greatest it, or any sensory experience can be anyway?),
but for now my journey continues.
Until very recently then, I literally couldn’t imagine me
purchasing a bottle of whisky for any other purpose than to drink it. If I buy
a bottle with the intention of not drinking it, then I’ll always need to
purchase another bottle for drinking, and I don’t have that much disposable
income.
To be fair, my collection method probably doesn’t even
really count as a collection any more than having four different types of pasta
in your cupboard counts as having a pasta collection. If it does, I’ve got one
of those too. No, I buy whiskies (special and not so special), I cherish them,
I open them, I drink them, I don’t cherish them as much as I did before I
opened them, I buy more (but different – I ver y rarely buy the same bottle
twice).
People like to collect things, so for some, having an
impressive collection is an end in itself, but when it comes to whisky, that’s
something I actually have trouble
understanding – what are you keeping it for? It is at odds with the essence of what whisky is; that, as a distilled
spirit – it is for drinking, unlike you know, people who collect pigs or
whatever – those items are made for collecting; they have no other purpose (not
real pigs, items in the shape of pigs). Even a collector of cars presumably drives his cars occasionally.
What I can understand though, is the value of actively
collecting whisky as an investment. Rare bottles can sell for thousands of
pounds, so with a little long term planning, smart buying and a lot of luck, in
20+ years even I could be making profits in the thousands… maybe… assuming
whisky will be valuable in 20 years time. It probably will.
Presumably some whisky collectors don’t ever even drink whisky, though I expect there is some crossover for
most people. They enjoy whisky, become intrigued by all those rare, expensive
bottles, then maybe they realise that they could have one in the future if they
start a collection now.
What intrigues me
about those expensive bottles though is what
does it taste like? I’ll never actually find out – unless I buy something
now, keep it, and get lucky enough for it to be rare and expensive in 20 years.
However, it will only taste the same in 20 years as it does now, so in reality,
I could already know what it tastes like, I just don’t know what those bottles
that are already vintage and expensive now
taste like – and some collectors will never know despite owning a bottle.
So isn’t it still better to buy it and then drink it? Yes, but then of course,
I haven’t made any money. But nor will I have had to keep something for 20 odd
years.
It just brings me back to how good can it be? In some last minute research before posting
this entry I looked up the most expensive bottles that are available on The Whisky Exchange and found an Ardbeg at
£3500 (not the most expensive by a long way, to be fair, but I chose to focus
on Ardbeg that day) that Jim Murray had supposedly raved about… giving it 96 out
of 100. But the ordinary 10 year old Ardbeg that you can buy for around £40
scores 97 out of 100… so there’s really no point, is there?
The ultimate, innocent ideal in terms of collecting is
probably someone collecting whisky for fun, as a child does, and then one day
realising their collection is worth a staggering amount of money. Overall
though, there can only be three purposes behind collecting whisky; drink it,
sell it, bequeath it to a loved one. You can’t take it with you, so collecting
for the sake of it doesn’t make sense. One day you’ve got to decide am I going to drink it, am I going to sell
it? And if neither… well your heirs might appreciate it, or they might just
have a party and throw it away, all the while shouting, “Chug! Chug! Chug!” and going, “Woooooooo!”
And that would be a massive crime. On your part.
Or if you haven’t got heirs, you could have a massive house
made of scratching posts constructed for your cats and feed them fresh trout
for the rest of their natural lives. Or get someone else to.
Buying whisky for investment isn’t all that attractive to me
anyway. It begs the question, if a bottle of whisky can be sold for thousands
of pounts… what is the motivation of the person who buys it? Presumably
doing so is no longer an investment, so must surely be a vanity project – to
own the most expensive whiskies.
It’s been a while since we had an imaginary conversation on
the blog, so imagine you met someone who told you they had an impressive
vintage whisky collection, and took you to see it:
wow, this is amazing!
I’d love to try… this one… and this one… and in fact, all of these…
Well you can’t.
Have you tried any of
them?
No.
Do you think you ever
will? Cos if you do, can I come?
I probably won’t open them.
[collective sadface]
An acquaintance of mine tends to buy two of everything – one
for drinking, one for collecting. That’s all very well, but not all whisky is
cheap, and it seems likely that a good proportion of the whisky that one day is
going to be valuable is already fairly expensive, so in the short term, that
£70 you’re indulging yourself with… just became £140 [yes dear, we can still go on holiday… it’ll just be Clacton-on-Sea this
year.]
Of most potential value is going to be anything that isn’t
widely available, and particularly bottles from closed distilleries and limited
editions – where the bottles might be numbered, or from a single cask, and
generally particularly old. That stuff don’t (necessarily) come cheap, though
it is useful as a guide for whether you should buy two bottles of something.
My thinking at the moment is that I would rather have had a
rare bottle and drank it, than to have one and never find out how it tastes. So
maybe one day I’ll be perusing expensive bottles and find one I’ve already
drunk. And then I think I’ll feel smug rather than upset that I didn’t save it.
Perhaps some collectors reach a point where it doesn’t matter how the whisky
tastes – it is in fact purely a commodity and no longer an example of one of
life’s finer pleasures.
Nevertheless, THIS interesting and informative website has
some interesting points to make on the matter of tasting and collecting – two
of which are very good pieces of advice.
Firstly, if you are serious about starting a collection, you
should agree an investment budget with your partner per year. That sounds
doable, and I have even mooted this possibility with Mrs Cake. I reckon that
for £200 a year I could select between 2
and 4 bottles that might give me some chance of turning a profit a number of
years down the line.
But what if you don’t live long enough to either sell it or
enjoy it? That brings me to the other suggestion which actually deals with the
dilemma of collecting versus drinking. The solution? Not buy two bottles, buy three. Then you drink one, save one to
sell in the medium term in order to accrue more funds for investment, and keep
the third indefinitely to accrue maximum value – except then you have to triple your outlay… which is frankly
ludicrous.
Collecting whisky for investment is obviously a long term
endeavour. You aren’t going to make much money for a good while and you’re
going to need somewhere to safely keep that growing collection, but if you can
keep it up and forget about it, one day you might find yourself sitting on an
impressive sum and maybe even afford that yacht you’ve always dreamed of (but
still probably not).
For now, I’m content to simply buy and drink. The future’s a
long way away and, thinking about it, the potential benefits probably aren’t
that significant anyway, once you’re ensconced in the reality of life and
money. It’s like recently when Mrs Cake and I were thinking about getting life
insurance, and based on how much we were willing to pay each month, they
determined we could have a £150,000 policy, so if I or Mrs Cake died, the other
would get that sum. Frankly that just doesn’t seem enough to be worth bothering
with. It would help if we had kids, but since we don’t (Operation Impregnatron
pending), I can’t see an Aston Martin or a paid mortgage or a lonely holiday in
Asia and a few years off work mending a broken heart (aw).
So with whisky, clearly I’d have to be making a profit of lottery
jackpot proportions in 20-30 years if I was going to consider it worthwhile
and, given that so many bottles have a price in the thousands for age, vintage
and rarity when released by the
distillery is it actually going to be those that I can’t afford in the first
place that are more likely to increase in value to astronomical levels rather
than my modest £50-£100 efforts? Probably. I’d want the return on my investment
to be life-changing, not representative of a fairly large drop in a cosmic
sized ocean. I’ve never really been motivated by money anyway.
So I think I’ve talked myself out of it for the moment.
Don’t let me convince you it isn’t worth your while though. Perhaps you can
justify the kind of investment required more than I can. You have to speculate
to accumulate after all, they say. It’s just that my speculation leads me to
thinking I’m not really that bothered. You’re not me though, are you? No. Make
your own mind up. And just think, if I keep drinking all those bottles that
might be valuable one day, that only serves to make yours more valuable (because there will be less of them). You’re welcome.
That’s it for me for another week. Thanks for staying till
the end if you did. I’ll be back uh… perhaps not next week as I think I’m going
to Amsterdam and Berlin to seek out some beer, jenever, absinthe and possibly
brandy but, after that, as ever I’ll be back with something equally as
interesting as this week’s post no doubt. In the meantime, enjoy yer week,
enjoy yer booze and if you’ve already got a whisky collection, leave me a
message eh? I’d be interested to hear what your motivation is, how it’s going,
how you got started and, more importantly, what’s in it?
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