Boxing Clever

From rookies to seasoned collectors, more buyers are stepping between the ropes of the whisky-cask arena

- by EUAN DUGUID

THE question came the other night between rounds on the heavy bag.

My pal Rab - a regular at Forgewood Boxing Club in Lanarkshire, where a few of us gather of an evening to keep ourselves in some sort of order as we approach a respectable vintage - caught his breath.

"Are whisky casks a good investment?" It is a query I hear more and more often. People have seen the headlines and want to know whether there is something in it - and the headlines can be dazzling.

At the time of writing, two Karuizawa whisky casks had just been sold at Christie's for a combined £4.25 million. Each cask fetched £2.125 million. Both were 500-litre sherry butts filled in 1999 at the now-closed Japanese distillery and drawn from the collection of whisky entrepreneur Sukhinder Singh.

Christie's described them as likely the last Karuizawa casks in private hands, each expected to yield around 420 bottles when eventually bottled. It is the kind of sale that sends a ripple through the whisky world.

But it is important to understand what that story represents. Karuizawa is a closed distillery. Its stock is scarce. Over the past decade its bottles have become some of the most sought-after whiskies on the planet, chased by collectors across Europe and Asia.

The Christie's sale was the summit of a very rare mountain, round 12 of a titan clash, but it is not the reality of whisky cask ownership.