A Bottle of Whisky Can Outperform Gold at Auction. Most Bottles Never Get the Chance
7 min read
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7 min read
In November 2023, a single bottle of Scotch sold at a Sotheby's auction in London for $2.7 million. At today's gold price of roughly $4,394 an ounce, that is more than 600 ounces of gold, about 17 kilograms. It is the kind of number that makes wine and whisky investment sound like a sure thing. It is also, by construction, the extreme outlier, not the typical outcome. Here is what the actual index data says about both, and why the headline bottle and the average bottle almost never tell the same story.
The bottle was a Macallan Valerio Adami 1926, one of only 12 ever labelled with pop artist Valerio Adami's design, distilled a century ago and bottled by the distillery in 1986. Its price has moved in public view for years: a bottle from the same edition sold for £814,081 (about $1.1 million) in May 2018 in Hong Kong, then £848,750 a few months later in Edinburgh, before the November 2023 Sotheby's sale set the current world record for a bottle of whisky at auction. Three different bottles from the same 12-bottle edition, not one bottle resold three times, but the trend across all three sales is the same: this specific, vanishingly rare label has kept setting new records.
That single fact is true and well documented. It is also the wrong number to build a decision on, because it describes one of the rarest objects in the entire whisky market, not what a bottle bought today is likely to do.
Two named indices track this market at scale instead of one bottle at a time.
Rare Whisky 101's Apex 1000 Index, which tracks the 1,000 best-performing rare whisky bottles by its own methodology, rose 384% between December 2012 and June 2024, according to Rare Whisky 101's own published comparison, which set that gain against the S&P 500's 283% and the S&P 500 Total Return's 375% over the identical window. Gold itself moved from $1,674.95 an ounce on 31 December 2012 to $2,325.06 on 30 June 2024, a gain of about 39% over that same stretch. On this specific measure, the best-performing slice of the whisky market beat both gold and the S&P 500 by a wide margin.
Liv-ex's Fine Wine 100 Index, the closest wine equivalent, rose a more modest 34.1% over the ten years to the end of 2025. That is a real, positive return, but nowhere near whisky's headline figure, and it sits well behind gold's own return over a comparable recent decade: gold ran from $1,308.95 an ounce in August 2016 to $4,393.80 on 8 September 2026 (Kitco spot price), a gain of roughly 236%.
The name matters here. Rare Whisky 101 built the Apex 1000 to track its best-performing 1,000 bottles, not a representative sample of the whisky market. That is closer to reporting the return of the winning stocks in an index than the index itself, and it is worth being direct about that rather than letting the headline number imply something broader.
The clearest evidence of the gap sits inside Rare Whisky 101's own tracked basket of 100 of the rarest, most expensive bottles in the world, reported through Knight Frank's 2024 Wealth Report covering 2023 performance. In that year, according to Rare Whisky 101 co-founder Andy Simpson, the worst-performing 50 of those 100 bottles lost 26% of their combined value, the remaining 50 gained a combined 5%, and only the top 20 bottles gained 20%. That breakdown is drawn from the 100 rarest bottles anyone tracks, an already highly selective group, and even inside it, half lost money in a single year. A bottle bought off a retail shelf, with no track record and no established secondary market, sits well outside that group.
Both markets have cooled since their post-pandemic peak, and the recent numbers are less flattering than the decade-long ones.
Rare whisky fell 9% in 2023, per Knight Frank's 2024 Wealth Report, and fell again by 10.9% in 2025, per Knight Frank's 2026 Wealth Report, the same edition that put the Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index's overall 2025 return at a marginal -0.4%. Separately, Rare Whisky 101 has reported a 16% year-on-year drop in the volume of rare whisky bottles sold at auction, alongside a dip in the average auction bottle price from about £370 to £363, evidence that fewer bottles are changing hands at all, not just at lower prices.
Fine wine tells a similar story. The Liv-ex Fine Wine 100 fell 2.5% in 2025 and sits almost 25% below its 2022 peak, even after the 34.1% ten-year gain cited above. A ten-year return and a three-year drawdown can both be true about the same asset at once, and a pitch that only shows you one of them is showing you half the picture.
If you are holding wine or whisky as part of your net worth, the honest way to track it is the same principle NetWort applies to any collectible: value it at what you could realistically sell it for, not at the most exciting comparable sale you can find. On the Holdings page, manual assets under Luxury Goods carry a Collectible sub-category with a generic default appreciation rate, meant as a starting point, not a verified figure for your specific bottle. A rare, well-provenanced bottle with real auction comparables might belong there. An ordinary bottle bought at retail, with no resale history behind it, is closer to a Standard-rated asset that loses value the moment it is opened or simply ages past its peak demand window.
The exchange rate matters too if you are converting a foreign auction result into rupiah for your own records. At Bank Indonesia's JISDOR rate of Rp17,636 per US dollar (4 September 2026), that $2.7 million Macallan would convert to roughly Rp47.6 billion, a conversion worth checking against the current macro rate rather than an old one, since it moves daily.
The data supports a narrower claim than "whisky and wine beat gold." It supports this: a small number of extremely rare, well-documented bottles and vintages have generated exceptional returns, a broader curated index of the best performers has also done well against gold and stocks over a specific decade, and the ordinary bottle sitting in a retail shop, with none of that provenance or track record, is not shown to do any of it. The gap between those two things is exactly where a marketing pitch usually stops talking and where the real research needs to start.
Before treating any bottle as an investment, check whether it has an actual auction or index history behind it, not just a story about rarity. If you already track collectibles inside your portfolio, our breakdown of collectibles and liquidity risk covers how slowly a watch, bottle or art piece actually converts to cash compared with a quoted price, and gold's own long-run real return against stocks has the fuller version of the gold numbers used above.