A bottle of scotch recently sold for $2.7 million – what’s behind such outrageous prices?

In November 2023, a bottle of Macallan Scotch whisky fetched the highest price of all time for a bottle of wine or spirits. Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing via Getty Images by Hovig Tchalian, University of Southern California When a rare bottle of Scotch whisky sold for US$2.7 million in November 2023, I was stunned, but I wasn’t surprised. The whiskey market has been booming for some time. Bourbon brands like Pappy Van Winkle from Buffalo Trace distillery are selling for astronomical prices in the secondary market. Japanese whiskies, which have become popular over the past decade, now fetch prices up to 50 times higher what they did a decade ago. And in July 2022, a single Ardbeg whisky barrel, aged since 1975, with enough liquid for about 500 bottles, sold at auction for around $19 million. In 1997, the entire Ardbeg distillery had been purchased by Glenmorangie Distillery for roughly $11 million. How could a single cask of Scotch whisky sell for nearly twice the value of an entire distillery purchased just over two decades earlier? I’ve been studying specialty markets for a decade, and I see at least two stories to unpack. One is economic, where items in low supply,...