wsky1

Where prices come from

The auction houses wsky1 aggregates, why every price is the hammer figure (not the buyer's all-in cost), and how the same bottle sold at different houses is pooled into one price history.

Every price on wsky1 is a real, observed hammer price from a public whisky auction — aggregated across houses, then pooled so the same bottle from any house shows up as one record. This page explains what "hammer" means, which houses feed the data, and how the pooling works.

Hammer price, not what you pay

All prices on wsky1 are hammer prices in GBP — the figure the auctioneer's hammer falls at. They exclude buyer's premium, the fee the auction house adds on top for the buyer.

At major Scotch whisky auction houses, buyer's premium currently runs at 24–28% on top of the hammer. So a bottle that hammers at £2,000 costs a buyer roughly £2,520 all-in. Sellers see the opposite: the seller typically receives the hammer minus a commission of about 5–15%.

We show the hammer because it's the one comparable, house-independent number — premiums and seller fees vary by house and change over time.

The auction houses

Prices are aggregated from the major public Scotch whisky auctions. The source codes and the house names they render as:

Source code Auction house
swa Scotch Whisky Auctions
auctioneer Whisky Auctioneer
whiskyhammer Whisky Hammer
whiskyauction whisky.auction
bonhams Bonhams
whiskybull Whisky Bull

Scotch Whisky Auctions is the backbone of the dataset. On a bottle page, the "Seen across auction houses" table breaks a bottle's history down by house so you can see where it actually traded — always with the full house name (never the abbreviation "SWA").

Synthetic sources (not real houses)

Two source labels are aggregates, not auction houses, and are excluded from any per-house breakdown of where a bottle traded:

  • market — "Market estimate": a synthetic per-distillery aggregate. It's filtered out of real-price and per-house views because no bottle was actually sold at "the market."
  • whiskyhunter — "WhiskyHunter": a distillery-level aggregate used for the distillery market-trend chart, not a lot-by-lot house.

How the same bottle is pooled

The same bottle sells at several houses under slightly different lot titles. wsky1's job is to recognise those as one bottle and pool their prices into a single history — that's what makes cross-house medians possible.

It does this with a canonical identity built from the bottle's defining facts: distillery + age + vintage + bottling + cask number + size + bottler, plus a noise-stripped edition remainder. Two rules matter most:

  • Age and distillation year are identity-defining. A conflict on either means it's a different bottle and the two are never merged.
  • Matching runs a strict structural gate first, and only bottles that pass it are ever pooled — a wrong merge would corrupt the price history, so the bar is deliberately high.

The upshot: on a bottle page, the latest sale, median, and cross-house figures all draw on that bottle's lots from every house at once, not just one.

How often it refreshes

Prices refresh daily — five scheduled scrapes run between roughly 03:00 and 10:00 UTC, writing new hammer observations into the price history. You can see the live counts and the last scrape's status on the live stats page.

A note on accuracy

wsky1 measures where the market has cleared — real observed hammers — not a guarantee of what any individual bottle will fetch. It's for informational purposes only and is not investment advice.

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