Whisky auction data: method, limits and downloads

How we count sold lots at UK whisky auctions, what the figures can and cannot show, and the tables you can download for each release.

The auction figures in the Scotch correction and the workhorse malts come from one release of sold-lot records, and so do the downloads below. This release, sm-568611a1ea, covers 1,846,804 sold lots at Scotch Whisky Auctions, Whisky Auctioneer and Whisky Hammer, from May 2011 to October 2026. It records what sold and for how much. It is not a valuation of any bottle and says nothing about what a bottle will sell for later.

Which auction houses and which lots

Only sold lots count. At Scotch Whisky Auctions a lot is sold when the results show a price. At Whisky Auctioneer it is sold when the result says “Hammer price”; lots that stopped at a highest bid below the reserve (39,329 of them, with £66.2 million of bids that nobody paid), lots with no bids and lots still live when we read them are left out. Whisky Hammer’s past results list only lots that sold, so every listed lot with a winning bid counts. Whole casks sold in bond are a different thing from bottles and are left out everywhere.

Distillery and brand come from the lot title, and at Scotch Whisky Auctions also from the opening of the lot description, which names the distillery. When we checked the name matching against the distillery Whisky Auctioneer itself gives for some lots, 99.8% of matches were right. Lots we cannot place, such as blends, undisclosed distilleries and mixed lots, count in the totals but in no distillery figure.

Prices are hammer prices

Every price is the hammer price: what the winning bidder bid. It leaves out the buyer’s commission (15% at Scotch Whisky Auctions and Whisky Auctioneer, plus VAT on the commission; 15%, or 12.5% on some lots, at Whisky Hammer) and delivery. Whisky Hammer says its hammer price includes 20% VAT when a VAT-registered business sells the lot, and the results do not say which lots those are. To see what a bottle costs delivered, use buying whisky at auction vs retail, which adds the fees.

We quote the median, the middle sale with half the lots above it and half below, because a handful of very expensive lots pull the average up. The average is shown beside it wherever there is room. A median or average needs at least 30 lots; a smaller group gets a count only.

Years and gaps in the record

Sold lots only, at Scotch Whisky Auctions, Whisky Auctioneer and Whisky Hammer; lots that failed to reach their reserve, lots with no bids and whole casks are left out. 15,105 sold Whisky Auctioneer lots from themed sales have no date, so they are in the totals but in no year. These are counts for these houses, not for the whole auction market, and a year marked incomplete should not be compared with a full one. Release sm-568611a1ea.

A year counts as complete only when every house had sales in all twelve months. Even then these are counts for three houses, not for the whole auction market: other houses, and private sales, are not included. Compare full years with full years, and treat the current year as a part year.

Comparing prices over time

A brand’s median across all its lots changes when the mix of bottles changes: a year with more old or rare bottlings, or more independent bottlings, pulls it one way, a year of standard bottlings the other. So our headline comparisons follow the same bottlings over time.

• Strict comparison (used for headlines). The same official bottling, one bottle per lot (any size from 20cl to 200cl, with 70cl, 75cl and 75.7cl bottles counted as the same bottling and other sizes kept apart; 75.7cl is the 26⅔ fl oz bottle of older UK and US labels), at the same house, with at least 5 sold lots in each of the two years. The earlier year is always a complete year: the peak-volume year when every house had sales in all twelve months of it, otherwise the complete year with the most sold lots. The typical change is the middle one of those bottlings’ changes in median price, so it cannot be moved by a change in which bottlings sold.
• All lots (exploratory). Every lot that names the brand, of any age, size or bottler. It is in the downloads for anyone who wants it, labelled exploratory, and we do not quote it as a headline.

Sold lots at Scotch Whisky Auctions, Whisky Auctioneer and Whisky Hammer. A bottling is one official release of the distillery (same name, age and edition, one bottle per lot of 20cl to 200cl, with 70cl and 75cl counted together and other sizes kept apart) at one house, and it counts only with at least 5 sold lots there in both years. The typical change is the middle one of the per-bottling changes in median hammer price, so a shift in which bottles sold cannot move it. Hammer prices exclude buyer's commission, VAT and delivery. 2026 covers January to October and is a part year. Release sm-568611a1ea; the full table, with each house on its own, is in the release downloads.

Even the strict comparison has limits. A popular bottling sells more often, so the result leans towards the bottlings that trade most, and a bottling sold in only one of the two years is not in it at all. It describes the bottlings that sold in both years, not every bottle of the brand.

Official and independent bottlings

A lot counts as an independent bottling when the bottler named on it is not the distillery or its owner: for example Gordon & MacPhail, Cadenhead or the Scotch Malt Whisky Society. Different spellings of one bottler are joined through a reviewed list, and bottlers that are separate companies with similar names, such as Douglas Laing and Hunter Laing, stay apart.

When a lot names no bottler at all, it counts as official by default. Whisky Hammer’s results record no bottler, and Scotch Whisky Auctions only sometimes names one, so this is common. That makes every independent share a lower bound: the true share could be higher by up to the share counted as official by default, which we print beside every ranking. Rankings by independent share include only operating malt distilleries with at least 2,000 sold lots; grain distilleries, closed distilleries and thin figures are left out.

Other limits

• Lots of several bottles are one lot at their hammer price. They count in totals and distillery figures, but not in the strict comparisons or bottle-level prices, which use single bottles only.
• Cask type is recorded only by Scotch Whisky Auctions, so cask comparisons use that house alone. Bid counts come from Whisky Auctioneer alone.
• Names that cover several things. Longrow and Hazelburn are made at Springbank, so the Springbank comparison uses the Springbank label only. “Imperial” also appears in the names of some cognacs, which inflates the closed Imperial distillery’s count a little. Bottlings from undisclosed distilleries (a “Secret Speyside”, for example) stay unmatched.
• Missing sales. Two Whisky Auctioneer sales, November 2014 and March 2015, were not found, and two houses recorded no sales in parts of spring 2020. The volume table marks every incomplete year.
• Closed distilleries. Past sales of a closed distillery’s bottles are a record of what sold, not a sign that any are available now. For a revived distillery, such as Port Ellen or Rosebank, the lots include bottlings made since it reopened.

What these figures cannot tell you

They show what sold, when, and for how much at these houses. They cannot tell you what a particular bottle will fetch at its next sale, whether a price will rise or fall, or what a different bottling of the same name is worth. They are not advice to buy or sell whisky, and we do not treat bottles as investments.

Downloads and versions

Every row carries the release id and the last month with sales. The manifest (JSON) lists each table's columns with a description, its row count and SHA-256 checksum, the houses with their coverage and missing months, and which lot statuses count. Everything in one JSON file is there too.

The tables hold totals, medians and counts only: no individual lot records, no lot titles from a single sale and no information about buyers. The release id is built from the tables themselves, so the same id always means the same figures, and a new release gets a new id. Before a release is published it is rebuilt from scratch and checked against our audit of the auction records: in this release 239 figures were checked and 0 differed.

Citing the data and reporting an error

Please cite the release id and link to this page. If you find an error, use the contact page with the subject line Correction, and give the release id, the table and the row, with a source where you have one. We check it against the auction records, and a confirmed correction is published in a new release with a new id; the previous release stays identifiable by its id and checksums.

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