Yahoo Finance Man sells decades of 'quirky' birthday presents to buy home
An English man with a £40,000 (AU$72,000) collection of whisky has put the alcohol up for sale to buy a home, after receiving the bottles as birthday gifts.
Matthew Robson has been gifted 28 bottles of Macallan single malt whisky every birthday by his father Pete, who estimates he spent £5,000 on the “quirky” birthday gifts over the years.
"Each year I received it as a birthday present," Robson told the BBC.
"I thought it was quite a quirky little present as I was slightly too young to start drinking.
"But I was under strict instructions, never, never to open them and I tried my hardest and succeeded and they're all intact."
Today, the whisky has benefited from a stratospheric increase in value with whisky broker Mark Littler describing the collection as a “perfect set”.
Littler said there are already several buyers interested in the collection, mainly from Asia and New York.
Rare whisky sees global spike in value
A hand-painted bottle of The Macallan 1926 Scotch in 2018 sold for AU$2.14 million, breaking records at the time before being eclipsed by the Macallan Fine and Rare 60-year-old 1926, which sold for AU$2.63 million in October 2019, making it the most expensive bottle of wine or spirit ever auctioned.
Rare whisky overtook classic cars on the Knight Frank 2020 Luxury Investment Index, with Knight Frank’s Rare Whisky index growing a huge 564 per cent in value over the last decade and 5 per cent in 2019.
This is driven by a surge in Asian investors “going mad for malt whisky”, the editor of the 2019 Wealth Report Andrew Shirley said, as well as an increase in challenger companies creating new blends of rare, collectible scotch.
