There’s chatter out there of the secondary market beginning to calm down, level off a bit. Apparently, a recent Sotheby’s high end whiskey bottle auction didn’t get the memo.
A single bottle of 2008 Pappy Van Winkle 23 Year (with original black velvet bag) went for $52,000 as two bidders got into a horse race of a battle to claim it.
This set an all time high (on record anyways) for price fetched for PVW, the world’s most well known prized American Whiskey.
All told, 14 PVW bottles sold for a cool $396,250, averaging $28K+ per bottle. Not bad considering the estimated range was $31,000 – $44,000 for the entire collection.
Not to be completely outdone, PVW 15 and 20 Year each set their own records at $9,375 and $27,500, respectively.
Jonny Fowle, Sotheby’s head of whisky and spirits, North America and Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), said: “It was exciting to be on the rostrum conducting the sale for this record-breaking bottle, which went far beyond anyone’s expectations.”
“Synonymous with enthusiasts, whiskeys bottled under the Van Winkle brand have gone on to become amongst the most highly rated and sought-after, gathering an almost cult-like following,” Sotheby’s said in a statement. “Many of those were distilled at the old Stitzel-Weller Distillery, opened on Derby Day in 1935, which went on to create some of the finest and most sought-after bourbons ever produced before its closure in the early 1990s, with production moving to the Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort.”
Not to dampen the Pappy parade, but biggest seller of the auction was a bottle of extremely rare Yamazaki 55 Year Old, which sold for $425,000. Perhaps most shockingly, this was well within its pre-sale estimated range of $350,000 – $500,000.
Whiskey these days is big business, we’ll drink to that.
