Whisky emerges as the best high-return alternative asset

Traditional assets such as Real Estate, Diamonds and Gold now appear to be outdated and less desirable. Wealthy investors have been turning their attention to alternative assets such as vintage coins, art and most notably, rare whisky. The simple reason behind this is that these types of investments are achieving much higher returns than the traditional assets.

These statistics have come from the international financial consultancy, Luxury Investment Index 2019, who state that whisky has generated higher returns than any of the previously mentioned traditional assets. Despite only being introduced to the index last year, rare whisky values have risen nearly 600% in the last decade. It has emerged as the most exciting and desirable asset of high-net-worth investors, with a large proportion of them coming from Asia.

A Knight Frank Rare Whisky Index report showed that one of 12 bottles of a 60-year-old ‘The Macallan’ with the label designed by artist Peter Blake, made over £615,000 at auction in March. Another interesting return reported by Knight Frank was on a single bottle of 1945 Domaine de la Romanee Conti DRC, a burgundy wine, which fetched a huge $558,000 at auction. 

The luxury asset classes the index tracks is made up of 10 different categories, of which rare whisky outperformed them all, both in 12 month and 10 year growth periods. No other asset class comes close to rare whisky in the 12-month period with it achieving 35% year on year in the first quarter of 2019. The next closest assets in that field are vintage coins and art which achieved 12% on an annual basis.

If investing in whisky is something you would like to find out more about, get in contact with the VCL team.