Whisky at auction is worth what it was in 2019-20. A bottle worth £100 in 2016 fetched £148 at the 2022 peak and £124 today, 16% below it. And more whisky is selling than ever: 616,496 lots last year against 78,160 in 2014. From 4.8 million lots across 30 auction sites.
The findings below come from DramX, which gathers the published results of 30 whisky auction sites into one searchable record. Every figure is a real hammer price the auction site published itself. There are no estimates and no valuations.
All of it is free to reproduce with credit. Findings like these are what subscribers get on Insights, and anyone can search the same record at dramx.co.uk.
Whisky is worth what it was in 2019-20. A bottle worth £100 in 2016 was worth £148 at the 2022 peak and is worth £124 today, 16% below the peak. Half the gains since 2016, given back in three years.
Three quarters of bottles are worth less than they were three years ago. The typical one is down 17.8%; one in four has lost more than a third.
The fall was not spread evenly. It landed almost entirely on the limited editions, the bottles people bought because they were scarce rather than because they wanted to open them.
A Macallan Harmony Rich Cacao made £312 in 2022 and makes £80 now. Macallan's Archival Folio 5 has gone from £1,931 to £622, a Springbank Local Barley from £431 to £194, and GlenAllachie's Billy Walker 50th Future from £145 to £71. Ardbeg's committee bottlings went the same way: Fermutation is down 48%, Scorch down 46%.
The whisky people actually drink held its price, and not because it was cheap. A GlenDronach Allardice 18 made £129 in 2022 and makes £148 now, up 15%. Balvenie DoubleWood 17 is up 8% at £172, Caol Ila 18 up 8%, Talisker 18 up 7%. A bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label made £110 then, and £111 now.
The typical bottle makes £95. More than a quarter sell for under £50, and 73% for under £200.
The bottles that make the news, the record-breakers and the million-pound Macallans, are the very thin end of a market that is, for almost everybody in it, cheap.
Lots over £1,000 are 4.8% of everything sold, and £633m of the £1.28bn spent.
The other 95% of bottles, better than four million of them, share what is left.
Lots sold have risen every single year on record: 78,160 in 2014, 616,496 in 2025. Nearly eight times as many.
The average bottle peaked at £363 in 2022 and is £224 today. In 2014 it was £189. The market is not shrinking: it is far bigger than it was, and well below its 2022 top.
The average buyer's fee has climbed from 9.8% of the hammer in 2014 to 14.2% today.
The average bottle peaked at £363 in 2022 and is £224 today. So the fee is up on 2014, and the price is down on 2022: a bigger share of a smaller hammer.
Japanese whisky has fallen 55% from its 2022 peak. Scotch fell 41% over the same three years.
It rose fastest in the boom and it has fallen hardest since. Karuizawa and Chichibu, the two names that drew the money in, have given back the most of it.
Followed bottle by bottle, the same bottle fetches within 3% of its year-round price in eleven months of twelve. December is the exception, at -6%.
The plain average is 10% higher in November than in July, and more money crosses the room then. That is dearer bottles coming to market before Christmas, not a better price for yours.
“Everyone quotes the million-pound Macallan. Meanwhile the bottle in your cupboard is worth what it was in 2019. Both are true, and only one of them is yours.”
DramX
DramX is a whisky auction research site built by collectors. It gathers the published results of 30 whisky auction sites into one searchable record of 4.8 million lots and counting, so that anyone can look up what a bottle has actually sold for, follow a collection's value over time, and keep a watchlist of bottles they are tracking. Subscriptions start at £6 a month for every past auction result on record, updated daily. Findings like those above are part of Pro Max, £25 a month. Companies work on Enterprise, priced to what is needed. It is free to search. dramx.co.uk
Nine charts at 3200×2000, shaped to drop straight into an article. Click any one to download it, or take all nine as a zip (6.8 MB). Charts on any other cut of the data, such as a distillery, a region or a period, can be produced on request.
Nine ready-to-publish charts accompany this release, at 3200×2000 and free to reproduce with credit to DramX. One for each finding above, plus a second on how far prices have fallen since 2022. Charts on any other cut of the data, such as a distillery, a region or a period, can be produced on request.
