Hey, Whiskey Collectors. How About A Legal Swap Meet At The Bourbon Festival?

This is just an idea now, but if enough people get behind it, it could become a reality.

I first suggested it here back in August, as a way to improve the Kentucky Bourbon Festival. "Attract Collectors. Get a law passed allowing whiskey collectors (legal age only, of course) to have a legal and above board swap meet" at the Festival.

It might work like this:

Let's say it's in a hall somewhere in Bardstown, a big room. Exhibitors have to register in advance but the only requirement is that they be of legal age. Collectors who want to exhibit pay a fee to do so. People who want to attend but don't want to exhibit buy a ticket. There probably will need to be a limit placed on how many bottles a non-exhibitor may carry in. Again, the only requirement is that everyone must be of legal age and IDs will be checked. All transactions will be private, between the participants. Transactions can take the form or either trades or sales. It lasts for maybe three hours on Saturday afternoon. And it's all legal.

The Kentucky Bourbon Festival is held each September in Bardstown, Kentucky.

Subsequent to that post I briefly discussed the idea with Eric Gregory, President of the Kentucky Distillers Association. He seemed to like it. The Festival, which KDA co-sponsors, would have to figure out how to do it legally, which might require some new legislation, so KDA is the outfit to work on that. Mr. Gregory seemed to think it was not completely outside the realm of possibility.

Mr. Gregory, by the way, is staff, but the KDA changes its board leadership every year. The new chairman for 2011 is John Rhea of Four Roses Distillery, the vice chairman is Jeff Conder of Beam Global, and the Secretary-Treasurer is Tom Krekeler of Campari (Wild Turkey). The other board members are Chris Morris (Brown-Forman), Andrea Wilson (Diageo) and David Hobbs (Heaven Hill). The board consists of one representative from each major company.

If you think this is a good idea, let the KDA know.

I would also encourage anyone who thinks it's a good idea to help flesh it out here with comments to this post. How might it be done? What would get you to participate?

How Much Is This Bottle Worth?

Maybe it’s the fault of Antiques Roadshow, or eBay, but everybody seems to think their house is full of hidden treasures. The most common question I receive, after, "what’s the best bourbon" is, "I found this old bottle of such-and-such, how much is it worth?"

Unfortunately, the true answer to either question does not usually satisfy the person who asked it. I like to say that the best bourbon is free bourbon. My answer to the second question is equally as oblique but not as witty. It contains a lot of 'maybe' and 'it depends.'

The secondary sale of American whiskey and distilled spirits in general is a rapidly changing field, complicated by the fact that, in the United States, it is illegal to sell alcohol without a license. There are collectors, they do buy and sell, and prosecutions for such transactions are rare, but the at-least-technical illegality of it all keeps the marketplace from being more orderly and transparent than it is.

At present, most of the action is on the auction web site eBay and perhaps on some of its many imitators.

Because of these difficulties, it is almost impossible to appraise a particular bottle of American whiskey. A precondition for assessing the resale value of anything is a sufficiently active and open secondary market for the type of object being assessed. The appraiser has to have knowledge of recent sales of the same or similar objects in order to estimate what a future sale might bring. It’s no more complicated than that but without that market information you can’t make appraisals with any confidence.

At present, the secondary market for American whiskey is too small and fragmented for anyone to be able to make an accurate assessment of any potentially collectible whiskey’s resale value.

My information regarding prices is based on personal contact with actual collectors. The most desirable and valuable whiskeys are pre-prohibition, prohibition-era medicinal, and post-prohibition whiskeys from distilleries that are now closed. A fourth category is limited editions from present day distilleries. Bottles in all of these categories re-sell for between $100 and $1,000 each. Although pre-prohibition whiskey is generally the rarest and most valuable type, hundreds of dollars have been paid for bottles produced as recently as the 1970s.

When you are paying hundreds of dollars for something, as opposed to thousands, you usually just trust your instincts and take your chances. It’s hard to justify much investment in authentication at those prices. In the world of Single Malt Scotch collecting, where prices are much higher, fakes have been a problem.

In American whiskey there are two very active but equally idiosyncratic subsets, Jack Daniel’s collectors and Maker’s Mark collectors. Both producers encourage collecting (but not, of course, any illegal activity) by issuing many limited edition commemorative bottles.

It might be fun if the law made it easier for collectors to openly engage in the buying and selling that is the essence of collecting, but that seems unlikely given prevailing attitudes about alcohol.