latest hammer price
Auction lots
3
Houses
1
Last sold
42 days ago
Karuizawa Founders' Cask (1981) is a collectable Scotch whisky from Karuizawa. Based on 3 recorded auction lots across 3 months of trading data, the current median hammer price is £2,800, with the most recent sale at £2,600. Over the trading window, prices have ranged from £2,600 (low) to £3,100 (high). Accounting for lot-to-lot variation, a realistic valuation range for Karuizawa Founders' Cask (1981) is £2,368–£2,832 (±9% around the latest sale).
Karuizawa is a whisky distillery. Karuizawa 1981 Founders' Cask is a no-age-statement bottling, distilled in 1981.
Closed / ghost distillery
Karuizawa closed in 2000 and has since been demolished — no new whisky will ever be produced, which underpins exceptional auction demand.
Single vintage
Distilled in a single year (1981), so the available batch is inherently finite.
These are scarcity and demand signals drawn from the bottle's own attributes — they describe the bottle, not a prediction of future price. Not investment advice.
Latest sale
£2,600
24-month median
£2,800
24-month high
£3,100
24-month low
£2,600
Estimated value · likely range
£2,368–£2,832 ±9%
Auction hammers swing lot to lot with condition, fill level and timing. Treat this band — not a single figure — as the bottle's value.
Rare at auctiononly a handful of lots a year
Seen at auction
3 lots
Cadence
≈ every 122 days
Houses
1
Activity rank
top 25% of tracked bottles
Last seen
42 days ago
Across the auction houses wsky1 tracks.
| Month | Median | Lots |
|---|---|---|
| September 2026 | £2,600 | 1 |
| August 2026 | £2,800 | 1 |
| July 2026 | £3,100 | 1 |
Karuizawa Founders' Cask (1981) appeared in 3 auction lots over the last 12 months across the auction houses wsky1 tracks — rare at auction (only a handful of lots a year). That puts it in the top 25% by auction activity among the 35,289 bottles wsky1 tracks — most collectable bottles hammer only a handful of times a year.
The latest hammer price for Karuizawa Founders' Cask (1981) at auction is £2,600. Across the most recent 24 months of auction data, the median hammer price is £2,800, with a high of £3,100 and a low of £2,600. All prices are in GBP and exclude buyer's premium. Data is aggregated from major auction houses including Scotch Whisky Auctions, Whisky Auctioneer, and Bonhams.
wsky1 currently has fewer than 12 months of auction data for Karuizawa Founders' Cask (1981), so a year-on-year trend is not yet computed. Recent hammer prices range from £2,600 to £3,100 (median £2,800).
Karuizawa Founders' Cask (1981) regularly appears at major Scotch whisky auction houses including Scotch Whisky Auctions (Scotland), Whisky Auctioneer (Scotland), Just Whisky, Whisky Hammer, and Bonhams. The current median hammer price is £2,800 (excluding buyer's premium). At most major houses, buyer's premium adds 24–28% on top of hammer for the buyer; sellers typically receive the hammer price minus a sales commission of 5–15%.
Karuizawa Founders' Cask (1981) has appeared in 3 recorded auction lots in our database, with a current median hammer price of £2,800. wsky1 provides hammer-price data for informational purposes only — not investment advice.
wsky1 ingests public auction results from major auction houses (via direct scraping of Scotch Whisky Auctions, Whisky Auctioneer, Bonhams, and Whisky Hammer, plus aggregated data from WhiskyHunter). For each bottle, we group hammer prices by year-month and compute the median price per month. The figures shown — latest £2,600, 24-month median £2,800 — are derived from this monthly-median methodology. All prices are hammer prices in GBP, excluding buyer's premium.
No. All prices on wsky1 are hammer prices only. Buyer's premium at major Scotch whisky auction houses currently runs at 24–28% on top of the hammer price. A bottle of Karuizawa Founders' Cask (1981) that hammers at £2,600 would cost the buyer approximately £3,276 all-in including buyer's premium.
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