How to invest in whisky: expert tips from a master vinter

Tim Ashley could be a broker at Goldman Sachs. He does come off as a City trader – chatty, gregarious, up for a laugh (and, one day, a drink).

But his VCL Vintners firm trades whisky rather than shares from an office that is just beside the Gherkin in the City.

Today, Tim is running a business with £70 million of whisky under management with a target of £300 million in the next few years.  

His aim is to demystify a trade he plainly thinks is a little pompous. Whisky, he notes, has three ingredients. It really isn’t that complicated…  

Who’s buying whisky? Whisky aficionados or tech entrepreneurs?

A lot of people have been coming to us after cashing in their bank-based assets or closing accounts with Hargreaves Lansdown; they’re fed up with low interest rates or trying to pick winners on the stock market and are looking for something stable, secure, and also quite fun. Our investors include young entrepreneurial types, whisky aficionados and those looking for a long-term asset that will create financial security in the future. It’s a market for everyone.

But whisky is a high-brow market, right?

There’s a lot of nonsense in the industry and a lot of double-barrelled names broking the casks. And we hear a lot of horror stories of casks being brokered with silly mark-ups. We’re different. We work on volume and have flipped the model to getting paid on the re-sale. So it’s in our interests to see that clients get in low and get out high.  

So, do you need to know your Dalmore’s from your Glenmorangie’s?

Not at all. We provide all the information in an accessible and easy manner to our clients. We’re not a hands-off digital platform, it’s a bespoke service and we make sure our clients can make a fully-informed decision.  

Whisky investment is a rich man’s game, right?

Wrong. Most of our clients are buying casks in the £10K-£30k region and sitting on them as a long-term hedge strategy against the markets and plummeting bank rates. It beats cash easily and people develop quite strong personal feelings about their casks too.    

How long is long term?

We don’t really entertain anyone looking at under a five-year investment horizon. If a client desperately needs to sell within that timeframe, we can and have always accommodated that, but whisky generally isn’t a flippable asset like a stock, it’s an investment.

Some of these casks are going for hundreds of thousands of pounds…

Sure, we’ve sold several ultra-exclusive casks up to £1m and beyond. Last year we sold an incredibly rare and old Dalmore for £2.1m and we had a couple of Macallan’s go for between £500-£1m. But the super-prime market is the preserve of the super wealthy, the real flow is in the lower end at £10-£30K with clients wanting an interesting investment that’s both tangible and finite.

Is it a liquid market? (Pardon the pun)

Cask sales are strong. Demand is strong. Sales and purchases are matched pretty easily. As a company we have always managed to achieve cask sales in excess of what the client has paid. We have never had a client lose money on a cask. Right now, demand is so high that we often have three or four clients pursuing the same cask asset. Ultimately supply/demand equations come into play.

How does someone from London gate-crash the whisky market?

With a great deal of difficulty, effort and road mileage! We’ve been going for 10 years now so the distilleries know us. We’re currently on the verge of signing off on an exclusivity deal with a well-known distillery to sell 23,000 litres a month – that’s 115 casks - and I can see that’s the trend going forwards.