This Year's Most Expensive Bourbons Share One Common Trait

Pappy isn’t getting any cheaper. According to new research by the price comparison site Wine-Searcher, five of the top six most expensive bourbons on their site are currently Van Winkle bottles, with Old Rip Van Winkle 25 Year coming in at an average price of $52,252 per bottle.

Now, these are not the typical Van Winkle yearly allocated releases from Buffalo Trace distillery, which fetch a mere four figures. The 25 Year was a particularly rare release, with liquid from the “old” pre-Buffalo Trace distillery, although it spent some time aging at the newer distillery. If you want to buy it online, rare spirits specialists Frootbat have it for “only” $49,999.99.

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As Wine-Searcher’s Don Kavanaugh notes, bourbon prices in general have gone up about 7.4%, but the most expensive bottles have dropped, some “quite spectacularly.” As well, the 2024 Most Expensive Bourbons list only includes expressions that have a minimum of five selling offers, so several bottles have dropped off the list.

Only two of the top 10 bottles saw a price increase: Van Winkle Twisted Spoke, a one-time single barrel bottled for the Twisted Spoke bar in Chicago in 1999, was up 6.6% since last year; and Michter’s Celebration Sour Mash, an occasional limited release, is up by 7.1%. The other non-Van Winkle releases on the list include Colonel EH Taylor Old Fashioned Sour Mash, The Last Drop 1980 Buffalo Trace, Hirsch Reserve 15 Year Old Pot Still and Weller’s Antique Reserve 10 Year Old.

Even though prices are dropping a bit overall, Kavanaugh suggests that rare bourbon has seen exceptional growth during the past few years. “Don’t start crying over your investment whiskeys just yet,” he writes. “Taking the longer-term view, it’s worth noting that, back in 2019, the average GARP was just $8,090 – and it was possible to make the top 10 most expensive Bourbons list with a global average retail price of just $3,189. So, in five years, the GARPs of the top Bourbons have effectively tripled.”