What's new on wsky1

Fresh reading in the blog, both grounded in real 2026 auction data. Glenfiddich and The Glenlivet are the two best-selling single malts in the world — and each guide starts from the counterintuitive fact that this scale is exactly why most of what they make isn't collectable. The value isn't in the 12 or 15 Year Old on every shelf; it's in the old vintages, the Rare and Cellar Collections, the ultra-aged trophies (Glenfiddich's Time Re:Imagined 50, The Glenlivet's Winchester Collection and the £650,000 SPIRA 60), and the old independent single casks. Each covers which releases actually hold value, how 2026 prices are moving, and how to price yours against real hammer data.

When a page's data failed to load — a dropped connection on back-navigation, a gateway hiccup — the app could leave you on a silent blank screen with no way forward. It now recognises those failures, and any page-level error shows a clear "Try again" button so you can retry on the spot rather than only "Back to home". We also get told when it happens now, so we can chase the cause.

Adding a bottle and batch import are core actions, so /add and /import are natural URLs to type straight into the address bar — but both used to dead-end on a 404. They now carry you to the real screens (and, if you're logged out, on to sign-in first) instead of nowhere.

A distillery's index card and its detail page could show two different "tracked" numbers for the same distillery — Port Ellen 98 vs 95, Brora 51 vs 47 — because one counted every catalogue expression and the other only those with a current auction price. Both now show the same total-catalogue count, matching the table beneath it.

Fresh reading in the blog, both grounded in real 2026 auction data. Glenfarclas as a collectable — the richly sherried, family-owned Speyside malt whose market runs from everyday ~£50 bottles of 105 Cask Strength up to five-figure Family Casks single casks. And Rosebank as a collectable — the triple-distilled "King of the Lowlands" that closed in 1993 and reopened in 2023, whose collectable market still rests almost entirely on finite pre-1993 stock. Each covers which releases hold value and how to price yours against real hammer data.

Product documentation is now published on-site at /docs — an overview page plus a page per topic (getting started, importing a collection, valuation, market reports, sharing your portfolio, and more), with a table-of-contents sidebar and Docs links back in the header and footer. There was no published docs destination before; now there's a real one, and it's in the sitemap so it's findable in search too.

When you mark a bottle sold, the sale-price field now starts blank and asks for the hammer price, instead of pre-filling what you paid. Confirming without editing used to record a sale at cost — a misleading £0 realised profit or loss. Now what you sold for is a conscious entry, not the path of least resistance.

The monthly market report's "top gainers" could headline impossible movers — a bottle up 481% over three months while actually down over the last one, built from a single thin sale. Those are now filtered out: a headline mover needs enough real lots on both sides, must not be moving against its own headline, and must have consistent 1-, 3- and 12-month figures. Thin or contradictory rows still appear in the full movers table, just never as the headline.

Distillery pages showed the "tracked" number three different ways — the header chip, a stat card and the prose each pulled a different figure and even labelled it differently (e.g. Macallan 951 vs 940). Every top-line "tracked" surface now reads the same source — expressions with real auction data — and calls them "expressions" consistently.

Whisky as an asset carries real risk, and our disclaimer to that effect used to show only in some places. It now appears consistently across every public page and inside the logged-in app, so the caveat is always in view — not buried on a single screen.

A new collecting guide, grounded in real 2026 auction data, on which Highland Park releases actually hold value — the 50 and 54 Year Old, the single-cask sherry bottlings, and the Orcadian Vintage series.

A cluster of "blank white (or all-black) page" reports all got tracked down and fixed. A stale build chunk on a long-idle tab — the kind left after a deploy — no longer strands you on an empty page during load; it quietly reloads and, if that doesn't help, shows a clear "newer version available" prompt instead of nothing. A decorative film-grain layer that could wash blog and marketing pages to solid black is fixed, and the /distilleries page — which was trying to render thousands of mis-parsed non-whisky entries and white-screening real devices — now lists only genuine distilleries.

On a brand-new portfolio, the 12-month chart used to backfill each bottle's auction history from before you owned it and then label the change as your own performance — so a seconds-old account could show a loss it never made. That's now clearly marked as market history, not your P&L, unless you've genuinely held the bottle that long. The "auction lots" dataset size shown across the site now reads from the live count so it can't contradict itself, and /prices and the market index now explain why their totals differ (same data, two ways of counting).

The /valuation page now has a per-distillery section: for each high-demand distillery, a data-grounded typical auction range (25th–75th percentile), linking straight to that distillery's page. Every distillery page also links back into it — so the common question "how much is my Macallan / Springbank / Ardbeg worth" now has a real answer to land on.

Some already-indexed /prices pages had started 404ing after a data cleanup changed their URLs; those now heal to the right bottle. Search-result breadcrumbs that Google was flagging as invalid are fixed. And a couple of places that leaked an internal bottler/edition code instead of the human name — in valuation search rows and on price pages — now show the real thing.

The big amber word in the headline on the home and /valuation pages ("whisky") was painted with a gradient-clip effect that some browsers, high-contrast modes and session recordings just don't render — so it could show up as a blank gap. It now falls back to solid amber everywhere, with the shimmer kept as a nice-to-have where it's supported.

Fresh reading in the blog: The Dalmore as a collectable, GlenDronach as a collectable, and a look at whether Japanese whisky is worth collecting in 2026.

A real session recording caught our own homepage rendering blank — the headline, subcopy and buttons were in the page but stranded invisible whenever the fade-in animation didn't run. The hero copy and calls-to-action are now visible by default, with the fade treated as a nice-to-have on top. If you ever landed on an empty-looking home page, that's fixed.

The engraved-plate sketch on a bottle's price page is drawn on demand, which meant that on a cache miss it could sit as a grey box for a few seconds and read as broken. It now shows an on-brand bottle silhouette while it renders, and starts loading eagerly since it's the first thing you see — so the page looks intentional the whole way through.

Credibility is the product, so a run of small inconsistencies got squashed. A valuation search row and the bottle's own page now count auction lots on exactly the same basis (no more off-by-a-few). Your portfolio's per-bottle estimates now sum to the header total. And the market-report movers no longer show implausible four-digit gainers built from a single thin early sale.

Fresh reading in the blog: Bowmore as a collectable, how to sell whisky at auction in 2026, and a plain-English breakdown of whisky cask investment scams. There's also a new step-by-step how-to for the free single-bottle valuation tool in the docs.

Importing a collection is no longer a leap of faith. The review step now shows, row by row, exactly which catalogue bottle we matched you to — with an alternative-edition picker when we're not sure we got the right one. Pasting a list understands comma- and tab-separated columns the same way a CSV does, and confirming an import gives you immediate feedback instead of a redirect that races the save.

A /prices headline was calling the latest sale a "median" — it now says what it means. Price cells round sensibly by size, so a £12,480 hammer and a £48 dram don't get the same false precision. Valuation search rows count the real number of lots behind a figure, and your portfolio's header P&L and 12-month chart are now labelled as the distinct metrics they are.

The auction photo on a bottle's price page is now clickable — tap it for a full zoom lightbox. The engraved-plate sketches got a rendering pass too (v12), clearing up speckled slabs and washed-out plates, and duplicated vintage years no longer sneak into catalogue bottle titles.

New bottles and pages now ping Bing the moment they change via IndexNow, so they're indexed in near real-time rather than whenever a crawler wanders by. The /valuation cluster carries HowTo structured data and tighter internal links, and we shut down a duplicate copy of the whole site that was serving on www — everything now redirects to the one canonical home.

Every bottle page now carries a hand-drawn, engraved-plate sketch rendered from the real lot photo — so you can confirm at a glance that the page in front of you is your bottle, not a near-namesake. It sits in a new two-column hero alongside the price, trend and tracking controls. Where no photo was captured, we search the auction house for one and only use it if it's an exact match.

A new block on every bottle page reads the last twelve months of real lots: how many sold, how often it comes up, which houses it trades at, and where it ranks against every bottle we track. A lot of trading reads as liquidity ("easy to find and to sell"); very little reads as rarity ("a good find when it appears"). Same data, honest framing either way.

Bottles now have a lifecycle. Mark one sealed, opened or sold, and a sale shows your realised gain or loss against what you paid. Populating a cellar got faster too: paste a list or drop a CSV — price paid and date bought included — and import the lot in one pass instead of one bottle at a time.

Credibility is the whole product, so a good chunk of the work went into the prices themselves. Multi-bottle auction lots no longer masquerade as a single bottle, mixed-variant outliers are clipped out of a bottle's history, and tripled auction titles are collapsed back to one. The lines on the page are quieter and more accurate.