The Collector and the Drinker: A Case for Both

There is a tension in the whisky world that surfaces, sooner or later, at almost every serious tasting. Someone mentions a bottle they have been keeping. Others ask when they plan to open it. A silence follows - the kind that contains a whole argument.

On one side: the view that whisky exists to be drunk. That a sealed bottle is a failure of nerve, a form of aesthetic cowardice, an abdication of the spirit's purpose. That the collector who buys rare bottles and locks them in a cabinet is, at best, misguided, and at worst, actively harmful - pricing out drinkers, distorting markets, hoarding something that belongs to everyone.

On the other: the quiet instinct, shared by almost every whisky lover I have met, that some bottles deserve to be saved. That the right occasion matters. That certain drams carry a meaning larger than the liquid inside them - and that opening them carelessly would be a different kind of failure.

I do not think this tension is resolved by picking a side. I think it is resolved by being honest about what collecting actually is, in all its forms - and by recognising that not all of them are the same thing.

The Commercial Collector: An Honest Assessment

Let us start with the version of collecting that generates the most friction, because it deserves to be addressed directly rather than avoided.

Between 2012 and 2022, the rare whisky market experienced extraordinary growth. The Rare Whisky 101 Apex 1000 Index, which tracks the most traded collectable bottles, rose dramatically over this period.¹ The 1926 Macallan with the Valerio Adami label sold for approximately $2.7 million at Sotheby’s in November 2023.² Karuizawa bottles from long-closed Japanese distilleries have sold for six-figure sums. Bottles that were available at retail prices a decade ago now trade at multiples of their original cost on the secondary market.

The speculative frenzy this created was real, and its effects on the broader whisky community were not uniformly positive. Bottles that enthusiasts might once have bought to drink became inaccessible. Distilleries responded by flooding the market with limited editions - an arms race of releases that produced a glut of mid-tier bottles that were neither affordable enough to drink casually nor rare enough to appreciate significantly.³

That bubble has largely deflated. The Mark Littler 999 Index dropped 11% in 2024, and the Knight Frank Rare Whisky Index declined 9% in 2023. The speculative investors who drove the frenzy have largely departed, leaving, as those closer to the market have observed, the people who genuinely understand and care about whisky.

The honest assessment of the pure commercial collector is this: at its most extractive, the practice of buying whisky purely to resell it at a profit treats the product - and the community built around it - as incidental to the transaction. The whisky becomes a commodity. The relationships and rituals that give it meaning are beside the point. I understand the economics. I do not find it particularly interesting.

But here is what I also believe: this is not what most collectors are doing, and it is not what collecting, at its best, means.

The Psychology of the Kept Bottle

The psychology of collecting - any collecting - is more interesting than the economics. Whisky Magazine's exploration of collector psychology cites several theories for why humans accumulate objects: to quieten existential anxiety, to express identity and loyalty, and because of the endowment effect - the well-documented cognitive tendency for things to become more valuable to us once we own them. These are not trivial motivations. They are deeply human ones.

What I find more compelling is what Sotheby’s identified as the emotional power of the unopened bottle: the way a bottle’s imagined perfection can hold a meaning that the liquid itself, once poured, can only partially fulfil. This is not irrational. Anyone who has opened a bottle they had been saving for years will recognise the experience - the strange mixture of satisfaction and mild grief, the sense that the occasion has arrived and that it is now, necessarily, over.

A bottle held in reserve is a bottle with a future. Once opened, that future collapses into a present that is finite, measurable, and passing. This is not a reason never to open bottles. It is a reason to understand what you are holding when you do not.

Research into the psychology of rare object collecting suggests that intentional, values-aligned collecting - particularly of culturally rich, time-bound objects - supports what psychologists call narrative continuity: the sense of a coherent story connecting past, present, and future self. A whisky collection, when it is built with care and meaning rather than purely for profit, functions as a kind of personal archive. It is a record of choices, moments, and anticipated occasions. It is, in a literal sense, bottled time.

Custodianship: The Case I Want to Make

The word I find myself returning to is not ‘collector.’ It is custodian.

A custodian is someone who holds something in trust - not just for themselves, but for a purpose, an occasion, or another person. The custodian’s relationship to the object is one of responsibility rather than possession alone.

I know people who keep a bottle of a distillery’s final release - Port Ellen, Brora, a Karuizawa from the last year of production - not because they intend to profit from it, but because they feel it deserves to be opened at the right moment, by the right people, in the right company. The bottle represents something that no longer exists and can never be recreated: the specific conditions, the particular year, the hands that made it. Opening it carelessly would be a kind of waste that has nothing to do with money.

I know others who have set bottles aside for their children. A whisky laid down in a child’s birth year, kept for their twenty-first birthday, costs relatively little and carries a significance that is entirely personal. The bottle connects time in a way that very few other gifts can. It was made when the child was born. It has aged as they have aged. It will be opened at the moment they cross a threshold their parents have been quietly anticipating.

There is something in this that connects to broader questions about how we mark the important moments of our lives - and how we give them weight. In a culture that increasingly values the instant, the ephemeral, and the disposable, the kept bottle is a quiet act of resistance. It says: this moment, when it comes, will deserve something that has been waiting for it.

Sotheby’s described one collector whose relationship to preservation was reshaped by his father’s passing, when an extensive pre-prohibition whiskey collection became part of his own life only after his father died. The bottles his father had saved for his own reasons now sat alongside bottles the son had saved for his. That inheritance - liquid, literal, and deeply personal - is not a market transaction. It is a form of love expressed through patience.

The Ghost Distillery Question

Port Ellen on Islay closed in 1983. Brora in Sutherland closed in the same year. Rosebank in Falkirk closed in 1993. These distilleries have since reopened - Brora and Port Ellen re-distilled their first new make in 2021¹ - but the whisky from the original operating periods is finite, irreplaceable, and dwindling. Every bottle opened is one fewer in existence.

For collectors who hold bottles from these distilleries, there is a genuine case that preservation serves the whisky community as much as themselves. A collection that includes historical expressions from closed distilleries is, in a meaningful sense, a museum - a set of artefacts that document the character, the style, and the era of distilleries that helped shape what Scotch whisky is. The collector who eventually opens and shares such a bottle creates an experience that cannot be replicated at any price.

The collector who keeps it sealed indefinitely maintains the possibility of that experience for the future.

Neither position is obviously wrong. But I think the custodian framing is more honest than the investment framing, and more generous in its intent.

What This Means in Practice

Let me be personal for a moment, as I often am in these articles.

I have two sons. And over the years, I have quietly been building something around them - not a collection in any formal sense, but a small, scattered set of bottles that are living alongside us as our family accumulates its experiences, its milestones, and its memories.

Some of these bottles are expensive. Some are not. That distinction matters less than you might think. What matters is that they are held with intention - that there is a reason each one exists, that has nothing to do with the secondary market.

This summer, those two worlds - the bottles and the boys - came together in a way I will not forget for a long time.

My younger son Raffy plays football with the Poppleford Panthers, a group of boys from Newton Poppleford and the surrounding villages of East Devon. This summer, they were invited to travel to Normandy for an international youth tournament - a proper adventure for a group of ten-year-olds, on the ferry to Cherbourg, playing against French teams on French soil. And my elder son Noah, who is twelve, was asked to coach them.

What followed was one of those weekends that parents carry around with them for years. The Panthers went unbeaten across six matches, drawing one and winning the rest. They came home tournament champions.

But what I kept watching, and what I found myself most moved by, was not the scorelines. It was Raffy. There is something particular about watching your child play in a team that his older brother is leading - a tension that sits beneath the surface of every training session and every game. The older one cannot play favourites; the younger one cannot expect special treatment. Each has to earn his place within the team dynamic on his own terms, and each has to find a way to be both brothers and, for that weekend, something closer to colleagues.

Raffy was magnificent. Not because he was the best player on the pitch - though he was excellent - but because of how he played with his teammates. The covering runs, the encouragement after a missed chance, the way he carried himself when things were difficult. He was, without theatre or fuss, an extraordinary team player. And Noah, for his part, found a way to lead that team that was generous and clear and calm - exactly the qualities I would want any young leader to find in themselves.

I came home with a bottle of French whisky finished in a pommeau cask - a Norman apple spirit that seemed to carry something of the landscape of that weekend in it. I will not keep it sealed for long. But I will drink it very slowly, a small measure at a time, over many evenings, because I want the bottle to last long enough to keep bringing me back to that trip. That is a different kind of custodianship: not the preservation of something rare, but the deliberate extension of something joyful.

I also acquired, on the same trip, several bottles of Armagnac from my birth year. The timing was not coincidental - I had recently been sworn in as a Cadet in the London Squadron of the Musketeers of Armagnac, an order with deep roots in the preservation and celebration of one of France’s oldest spirits. Armagnac from one’s birth year carries a particular resonance in that tradition. Those bottles are being kept rather more carefully.

For both boys, I have set aside other bottles - more considered ones - tied to their birth years and to milestones I am quietly anticipating. Some are expensive enough that they may one day choose to sell them: to buy a car, fund a trip, or make some decision I cannot yet predict. That is entirely their right. I hold the bottles knowing that when that moment comes, the choice will be theirs to make. The bottle does not dictate the outcome. It simply keeps the option open.

This is what I mean by accumulation. Not of bottles, but of meaning. The bottles sit quietly while life continues around them. They are present for the first days of school and the victories in Normandy and the swearings-in and the ordinary Tuesday evenings. When they are eventually opened, they will carry all of that with them. The value was never in the liquid alone.

A Final Word on Drinking

None of this is an argument for not opening bottles.

As one Ardbeg enthusiast, quoted in Scotch Whisky magazine, said with characteristic wisdom: ‘It’s only a bottle of whisky. It’s only distilled barley.’¹¹ That perspective is healthy and right, and worth holding alongside everything I have written above.

The greatest whisky experiences I have had were not with bottles I had been saving. They were with bottles that someone opened generously, unexpectedly, because the moment felt right. That generosity - the willingness to open the good bottle rather than saving it for a hypothetical better moment - is one of the things I love most about whisky culture at its best.

The custodian and the generous drinker are not opposites. They are the same person, operating at different points in time. The bottle saved thoughtfully is the bottle opened memorably. The skill is knowing which is which - and having the courage, when the moment arrives, to reach for the corkscrew.

At Devon Drams, we believe that whisky is, at its heart, a social object. It is made to be shared, discussed, and experienced in company. Whether that company is gathered around a formal tasting or around a kitchen table late at night with a bottle that has been waiting for exactly this occasion - the spirit’s purpose is the same.

devondrams.com/events | community@devondrams.com

Sources

1. Really Good Whisky Company. Tracking Whisky Price Trends in Collector Markets. reallygoodwhisky.com (Accessed: June 2026)

   
   

2. Spiritory. Is Whisky Investment Coming Back in 2026? spiritory.com (Accessed: June 2026)

   
   

3. The Whiskey Wash. Why the Whisky Market Correction Remains a Golden Opportunity. thewhiskeywash.com (Accessed: June 2026)

   
   

4. Mark Littler Ltd. 2025: The Year to Sell or Buy Whisky Casks? marklittler.com (Accessed: June 2026)

   
   

5. Ibid.

   
   

6. Whisky Magazine. How to Build a Whisky Collection - With Meaning and Feeling. whiskymag.com (Accessed: June 2026)

   
   

7. Sotheby's. To Drink or Not to Drink? The Great Whiskey Collecting Question. sothebys.com (Accessed: June 2026)

   
   

8. Alibaba Product Insights. Is There a Psychological Benefit to Collecting Rare Liquor Bottles? (Accessed: June 2026)

   
   

9. Sotheby's. Ibid.

   
   

10. General reference to reopening of Port Ellen and Brora distilleries, 2021.

    
    

11. Scotch Whisky.com. The Psychology of Whisky Collecting. scotchwhisky.com (Accessed: June 2026)