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\n\tThe\u00a0news\u00a0has not been great for the global spirits marketplace, as we\u2019ve reported many times over the past year. Still, despite distilleries\u00a0pausing production\u00a0and corporate sales figures slipping, one bright spot seems to be in the\u00a0auction\u00a0market\u00a0for rare and expensive whiskeys. One of the leading auction houses, Sotheby\u2019s, released its 2025 Wine & Spirits Market Report late last week, and it details a bevy of information showing how it is out performing general market trends.<\/p>\n
\n\tAccording to the report, auction sales in 2025 totaled $127.5 million, a year-over-year increase of 12 percent. A third of the buyers were new to Sotheby\u2019s and more than half were under the age of 50, representing 63 different countries around the world. Some of the highlights from 2025 were the partnership with the Distillers One of One auction in Scotland, which included 39 ultra-rare and aged whiskies from 35 companies and distilleries. Sales from this auction totaled $3.9 million, which far surpassed the pre-sale estimate.<\/p>\n
\n\tSotheby\u2019s also partnered with certain distilleries to auction off one-off bottlings for charity, including\u00a0Bowmore\u2019s Arc-54\u00a0Iridos, the\u00a0Macallan Distil Your World\u00a0Mexico Single Cask Edition, and\u00a0The Dalmore 52 Year Old Luminary No.3 \u2013 The Rare. And in January, a\u00a0record\u00a0was set when a bottle of 20-year-old Old Rip Van Winkle sold for $162,500, making it the most valuable American\u00a0whiskey\u00a0ever sold at auction. \u201cOur 2025 results underscore the strength and momentum of Sotheby\u2019s Wine & Spirits business,\u201d said Nick Pegna, global head of Sotheby\u2019s Wine & Spirits, in a statement. \u201cThis success has been driven by a truly international buyer base, strong growth in new collectors, and our depth of expertise in presenting landmark single-owner collections.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tIt\u2019s not just Sotheby\u2019s that is showing positive signs in the auction market. Unicorn Auctions, which was founded in 2020, also reported strong numbers for 2025 (full disclosure\u2014I am also the editor of the Unicorn Review, the company\u2019s separate editorial website). The company has had more than $175 million in lifetime sales spanning nine million bids on more than 500,000 bottles. That included the record-setting auction in partnership with the Chicago Blackhawks last fall, which raised almost $400,000 on sales of bottles like the Very Very Old Fitzgerald 18\u2011Year \u201cBlackhawk\u201d expression of Stitzel-Weller produced bourbon. Unicorn also reported a much broader customer base than what has typically been the case for auction houses. Christie\u2019s has also made news recently with the sale of two casks of\u00a0whisky\u00a0from the Japanese ghost distillery\u00a0Karuizawa, which were auctioned off for a record-breaking sum of \u00a34,250,000 (about $5.7 million).<\/p>\n
\n\tThe expectation is that, for all of these auction houses, 2026 will continue to be a good year. It seems that while people are not consuming as much alcohol and spending less money on name brands from legacy producers, collectors are still out there in smaller but meaningful numbers, and they are eager to get their hands on rare bottles. To that end, Sotheby\u2019s just announced its\u00a0Whisky & Whiskey\u00a0auction for 2026, which includes bottles from the Dayton Ong Collection like the\u00a0Macallan\u00a0Fine & Rare series,\u00a0Glenfiddich\u00a064 Year Old 1937 (the oldest vintage from the renowned distillery), a two-gallon bottle of Plankinton Reserve Cedar Brook Whiskey\u00a0distilled in 1903, and 1.5-liter magnum bottle of Black Maple Hill 19-year-old bourbon.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Whiskey_Auction_Sothebys.webp?w=1000″] The\u00a0news\u00a0has not been great for the global spirits marketplace, as we\u2019ve reported many times over the past year. Still, despite distilleries\u00a0pausing production\u00a0and corporate sales figures slipping, one bright spot seems to be in the\u00a0auction\u00a0market\u00a0for rare and expensive whiskeys. One of the leading auction houses, Sotheby\u2019s, released its 2025 Wine & Spirits Market […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1834507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1834507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1834507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1834507\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1834507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1834507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1834507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}