Chinese Tourists Are Spending Thousands of Pounds on Scotch in the UK

In the world of high-end Scotch, there are rare specimens with vertigo-inducing price tags. We're talking about things like a one-of-a-kind $460,000 Macallan in a Lalique crystal decanter and $160,000 Dalmore blends containing booze that nearly dates back to the American Civil War. Comparatively, a regular old Macallan 30 at around $4,000 is a downright steal. Seeing a bargain abroad, The Independent reports that wealthy Chinese are flying to the UK to pick up multi-thousand-pound bottles in bulk.

The Independent spoke with two London whisky stores that regularly sell up to £50,000 (a little over $60,000) worth of Scotch to Chinese businessmen and tourists, some of whom fly to London for the expressed purpose of buying prestigious bottles. One shopkeeper recounted how when the store only had so many Macallan 30s in stock, a buyer planned to send his driver to the distillery hours away in Scotland for more. Thankfully, additional bottles were sourced from another nearby store.

For Chinese buyers interested in purchasing rare whisky, it can make financial sense to buy it in a foreign country and bring it home—the tax rate for imported booze in Hong Kong, for example, is 100 percent. Those who buy abroad don't necessarily declare their acquisitions to customs.

There's no way of knowing whether these bottles are actually consumed or put on display back home. But Spiros Malandrakis, an Alcoholic Drinks Analyst at Euromonitor International, says the market for Scotch has matured in China and that tastes have shifted from ostentatious consumption to "a new normal, the rising middle class that is consuming Scotch on an everyday basis."

"Back in the day it was all about the combination with green tea," Malandrakis told MUNCHIES. The desire to purchase nice bottles of Scotch for prestige was there, but the palette for drinking them wasn't—similar to the Lafitte-and-Coke phenomenon. "The new kind of luxury after the recession is more subtle, and more about craftsmanship and artisanal credentials rather than diamond-encrusted decanters."

"Of course there is space for these products when you only want to sell 100 bottles," he added. Such outrageously luxurious bottlings tend to give a distillery's whole range a "halo effect," in which the brand shines a little brighter thanks to the presence of an ultra-premium limited edition.

And though there's been a lot of hand-wringing about what will happen to the Scotch export industry in light of Brexit, Malandrakis doesn't believe there is any sort of rush to fly to the UK and buy Scotch to take advantage of the weak pound. "I don't think that has anything to do with people who are about to buy a £200,000 bottle of whisky," he said.