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Photo by Dylan de Jonge via Unsplash
When markets are shaky, investors typically pour capital into “safe havens”—asset classes that typically hold up during turbulent times. These are the usual suspects—gold, treasury bills, reserve currencies—tried and tested with long track records and plenty of data to spill over. This exclusive club of go-to assets rarely admits new members, but could that be about to change? An unlikely contender awaits in the wings—whiskey.
Last year’s Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index estimated that rare whiskey has seen its asset value grow by a staggering 564 percent over the last 10 years. Fine wine, watches and vintage cars were beat by comfortable margins. 2019 saw a new record set for the most paid at auction for a bottle of the good stuff; a 60-year-old Macallan from 1926 fetched just north of $1.8 million at Sotheby’s in London. With Macallan on the verge of releasing an ultra-small batch of bottles of 71-,74- and 78-year-old Scotch (the latter being the oldest Macallan has ever released), that record is unlikely to stand for long. American whiskies have gotten in on the action, too; a barrel of Michters recently changed hands at a charity auction for $210,000, the highest amount ever paid for a single cask of bourbon. We barely need to mention how Japanese bottlings are faring; a 52-year-old Karuizawa recently went for nearly half a million dollars, and interest in Japan’s oldest and rarest stocks shows no sign of waning.