It seems that single malt whiskies have all but matched the status of chateau-bottled great clarets. A good single malt, once the age statement is in double figures and the abv reading is 46% or cask-strength, has an aura that commands respect – and an increasingly high price tag.
The problem is that too many of their prices are, to my mind, unrealistic. I recently spent a weekend in Edinburgh—and spent a lot of time in the Royal Mile – so I browsed around the many whisky shops, including the outlet at The Scotch Whisky Experience.
OK, it was the Royal Mile, awash with battalions of tourists, many keen to take a good bottle of malt back to Berlin, Beijing, Baltimore or Buenos Aires. However, many must have felt that they could buy some of those whiskies cheaper back home.
Almost every bottle at the Scotch Whisky Experience was £10 more than at my favourite bootlegger (and he isn’t cut-price), with one famous malt more than twice what I paid for it at the distillery. Almost all whiskies at the Experience were “mainstream” – familiar bottles produced by the makers themselves (whether Diageo, Edrington, Chivas Brothers or whoever), which allowed clear comparisons with supermarket and off-licence prices…
Things were different in some of the whisky shops. Many sold single-cask bottlings and other special expressions of countless different malts, some from rarely-seen distilleries, but most bottles were priced from the high forties upwards. Older bottlings, that is 15 or 18-years, were usually far nearer £100 than £50. Even older blended malts, often with labels I had never seen before, were well over £50. Even allowing for the current weakness of sterling against the dollar and the euro, such prices must strike many tourists as steep.
For those with fat wallets, there were some collectable malts at mind-blowing prices, including an ancient Macallan at a cool £25,500 plus a row of Port Ellens running from around £2000 to more than £4000.
At the end of the day, after looking at all the bottles in all the shops, I hardly saw one that seriously tempted me. Simply because they all struck me as overpriced. True, this was Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, but it doesn’t means whiskies there should cost a king’s ransom.
