A Sampling Tour of Scotland’s Finest Investment Whiskies

Iwas never much of a whisky drinker. Wine—the really good stuff—was always my drink of choice. But then, in an Irish pub one evening with a group of Irish folks, I was offered a glass of Red Spot, a 15-year-old Irish whiskey (Ireland spells whiskey with an “e,” Scotland does not). It was divine. And just like that, I was a whiskey fan.

It probably helps that a bottle of Red Spot goes for about $150. High end almost always tastes better.

But the experience got me thinking. You see, wine is not merely my favorite tipple, I’ve made a lot of money from investing in it. Around 2007, I started buying investment-grade wines. At one point, I had a 600-bottle collection of wines from France, Italy, Spain, and California.

I sold off my collection at auction some years back during my divorce, turning an investment of less than $10,000 into more than $60,000. That chance encounter with some of Ireland’s finest made me think it was time to start a new collection, this time of high-end whisky.

In recent decades, whisky, and particularly Scotch whisky, has emerged as a major collectible category for investors. The Knight Frank Wealth Report noted last year that rare whisky prices are up 586% in the past decade, or 21% per year. On an individual bottle level, profits can be dramatically larger. The 2016 edition of Macallan’s 18-year-old single malt, for instance, jumped from $463 per bottle in 2020 to $1,209 in 2022, a gain of 62% per year.

And so I decided to take a tour of Scotland’s Speyside region, home to the largest concentration of high-end whisky-makers on the planet.

The Distilleries of Speyside

Collectibles are surging in value right now. With inflation in the 7% to 8% range in the U.S. (even higher in Europe), investors are looking for ways to move their depreciating dollars, euros, and pounds into hard assets that have a track record of preserving wealth—art, comic books, gold and silver coins…and rare whisky.

Armed with that knowledge, I trekked to Speyside, on Scotland’s northeastern coast, to tour some distilleries and taste several of their best offerings to get a feel for whisky at this level. If nothing else, driving this part of Scotland, meandering from one distillery to the next across green hills and leafy river valleys, is a fabulous way to experience what is a fantastically beautiful part of the world.

Speyside is legitimately the epicenter of the whisky universe. More than 50 distilleries dot its hills and valleys. I booked tours at six: Glen Moray, Benromach, GlenDronach, Glenfarclas, and two of the most popular Scotch brands—Glenfiddich and Macallan. I wanted to experience both the grand dames of single malt as well as smaller, less well-known distillers.

There are only three ingredients in whisky: water, malted barley, and yeast, but every distillery approaches the alchemy of combining them in its own way.

At Benromach, one of the smaller distilleries, traditional processes endure. Enormous wooden mash tuns—used to mix ground malt with water—still play a part in the brewing process, and peat is still used to heat the stills, giving the distillery that distinct, earthen aroma. Everything about the experience at Benromach, in fact, is low-key. You almost feel like you’ve walked into a distillery to find a friend who will happily take you around the place to show you what he does every day.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the space age-looking Macallan distillery. The new $190 million facility is like the Disneyland of whisky. It’s impossible not to “ooh” and “aah” as you approach the curvilinear building cut seamlessly into the hillside of a gorgeous leafy glen…and see the massive, multi-story glass wall displaying more than 700 bottles of whisky.

The tour of the Macallan distillery takes you through a room with 36 gleaming copper pot-stills. And the tasting of three whiskies happens on an elevated platform, in a darkened circular room, surrounded by scores of barrels of aging whisky racked 40 feet high, from floor to ceiling.

Regardless of approach, each distillery is producing exquisite liquids.

Benromach’s $2,300 bottle of 40-year-old recently picked up “Best in Show” at the San Francisco World Spirit Competition and has been picked as one of the top investment whiskies for 2022. And Macallan has a range of whiskies—from $75 to more than $6,500—that are among the world’s most collectible bottles.

Why It Pays to Go on Tours

At Benromach, I met a couple from Germany, who, for 20 years, have been driving to Scotland to add to their 120-bottle collection of high-end whiskies.

There are several reasons why they, and many other investors, keep coming back and taking the same distillery tours.

First, they are hugely enjoyable experiences—it’s not just because of the inviting smell of decades of whisky that has evaporated into the air through the wooden barrels—what’s known as “the angels’ share.” At Glenfiddich, I was lucky to be in the warehouse when warehousemen began rolling in several barrels, positioning them over a trough. They knocked off each barrel’s wooden plug, creating a river of whisky that perfumed the entire area and which was pumped into large, wooden tanks for storage and blending.

The second reason investors like to visit in person is that it’s a great way to gain access to whiskies that otherwise can be quite challenging—and pricier—to find at home. Take the 21-year-old Benromach. At the distillery, you can grab a bottle for about $160. Online in the U.S., you’ll pay at least $180. Or Macallan’s rare A Night on Earth in Scotland, a limited-edition seasonal release that costs $118 at the distillery…or $250 at U.S. retailers.

The third and most important reason is that while the tours and processes rarely change, the tastings at the end do…offering the opportunity to sample some of Speyside’s best, and newest whisky.

Every distillery tour typically includes three samplings, one of which is almost always the basic, flagship whisky, usually in the eight- to the 12-year-old range. Most will also include a mid-level bottling, typically a 15- or 18-year-old, many of which are quite excellent, including the Double Cask 18-year-old Macallan.

But it’s the third dram where the interesting opportunities emerge if you’re a whisky fan and investor.

In some cases, that third dram seems to be a product with limited appeal that the distillery is using until supply is exhausted…which was my impression of Glenfiddich’s Orchard Experiment. The hint of apples and spices were tepid and the overall expression was weak.

Then there was Glenfarclas, which not only offered up an excellent 25-year-old whisky as the third dram, but we also got a fourth tasting of the Family Cask 1991 vintage, one of the distillery’s collection of annual bottlings from its best casks. It was a sublime whisky that, in the gift shop, fetches the equivalent of $600 per bottle.

At GlenDronach, I was lucky. The tour group was tiny, just two of us ambling though a picturesque collection of cottage-like buildings from the early 1800s. After the tasting, I asked the guide what the chances were that I could taste even a sip of the 21-year-old Parliament, a whisky that’s much raved about in the spirits press.

He smiled and led me to the bar and dribbled out a tiny taste. A full dram was more than $50. The whisky was ambrosia. Soft, elegant, mellow, floral, sweet, hints of vanilla after aging for more than two decades in old, sherry casks from Portugal.

The 21 is so good, in fact, that I immediately pulled a credit card from my wallet to buy a bottle for just under $200. It was the first bottle in my new collection of investment-grade whisky…and I’d made a gain as soon as I bought it. The 21 is at least $250 Stateside.

How to Start Investing in Whisky

Of course, you do not have to visit whisky distilleries to begin building a collection of high-end Scotch that will likely appreciate in value over time. You can just as easily wander into a local liquor store that carries a nice selection of upscale whisky. Nor do you need to start with top-of-the-line bottles that sell for $500 to thousands of dollars each.

I’d start with a nice Macallan Classic Cut line, an annual limited-edition bottling. The 2021 edition costs about $120. The 2017 edition already fetches north of $200. With time, these should do well because of global demand for Macallan and their limited releases.

Take a look at affordable older vintages too, such as the Glenfarclas Family Cask. Prices for those have big potential. Some of the vintages back to 1999 are less than $300 at the moment. Older vintages are 2× to 5× higher, telling me that holding these for several years could produce a nice pop.

And if you just want a good drinker or two to enjoy, you can’t go wrong with a 12-year-old GlenDronach at about $60, or the Benromach 15-year-old at about the same price.