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About That $200 Bottle of Whiskey...
Dec. 26th, 2025 11:11 amI wrote the other day that a coworker sent me a Christmas gift of a bottle of whiskey... that turns out to be a $200 bottle. Seeing the price gave me pause because I don't buy liquor that expensive for myself. Okay, I have split bottles of wine in restaurants that have run well past $200, but that's with restaurant markup. I figure the price at a good discount liquor store like Total Wine would be anywhere from 1/3 to as little as 1/5 of that. And it's at Total Wine that that bottle of whiskey goes for $209.99. At BevMo it's $226.
The price of the gift wasn't the only shocker I saw when I looked up details on it. My search for "Yamazaki whiskey" (Yamazaki is the producer) turned up the deets on this old friend:
Yamazaki 12 year single malt is a Japanese whiskey I discovered umpteen years ago when I started traveling to Japan and was first exploring whiskey. I say discovered because back then, in the late 00s, Japanese whiskey was not common in the US. The first few bottles I bought— including one that was a gift for a colleague who'd helped me from Sunnyvale on a project, staying up late working until midnight a few nights to sync time zones with me in Tokyo— I bought in Ginza and hand-carried home on my NRT-SFO flight.
I was a few years ahead of the curve on Japanese whiskeys. The first bottles I brought home were novel even to my few friends who were whiskey fans. One had dozens of bottles of whiskey on his shelf at home, and this was new to him.
Within a few years Japanese whiskey got popular in the US. I was able to buy Yamazaki 12 at places like BevMo. The price was still reasonable, at first... $35, about the same as I paid at a liquor store Tokyo, adjusting for exchange rate.
But then Japanese whiskeys got stupid popular in the US. Actually, all whiskey got popular. In the early/mid '10s in the US whiskey had become the "it" drink. And Japanese whiskey became what the self-styled whiskey sophisticates drank to show the whiskey mass-market drinkers how they were more sophisticated because they'd already gone beyond the traditional Scotch and Irish whiskeys everyone else was celebrating. Soon the mass market drinkers wanted in on Japanese whiskey, too. The result was the comparatively small Japanese production houses sold out so much of their liquor that age-statement whiskeys like Yamazaki 12 became extremely rare.
Long story short: The Yamazaki 12 year is now a $200 bottle, too!
I wish I'd bought a few more bottles when they were $35. Alas I only have the one, and there are only maybe two shots left in it. I'll have to drink them with intention.
Once I saw how much the price of Yamazaki 12 year had inflated I was curious about another, even more expensive Japanese whiskey I also picked up umpteen years ago.
This Hibiki 17 year was about $85 when I bought it in Japan in 2010. That was the most expensive bottle I'd bought up to that point. Adjusting for inflation it'd be $125 today, which is still more than I've paid for any bottle. But inflation is not the only story here.
As with the Yamazaki 12, Suntory sold so much Hibiki when it was stupid-popular that they sold out most of their back-stock. Hibiki 17 has been discontinued. Bottles now sell for $800+. 😳
The price of the gift wasn't the only shocker I saw when I looked up details on it. My search for "Yamazaki whiskey" (Yamazaki is the producer) turned up the deets on this old friend:
Yamazaki 12 year single malt is a Japanese whiskey I discovered umpteen years ago when I started traveling to Japan and was first exploring whiskey. I say discovered because back then, in the late 00s, Japanese whiskey was not common in the US. The first few bottles I bought— including one that was a gift for a colleague who'd helped me from Sunnyvale on a project, staying up late working until midnight a few nights to sync time zones with me in Tokyo— I bought in Ginza and hand-carried home on my NRT-SFO flight.I was a few years ahead of the curve on Japanese whiskeys. The first bottles I brought home were novel even to my few friends who were whiskey fans. One had dozens of bottles of whiskey on his shelf at home, and this was new to him.
Within a few years Japanese whiskey got popular in the US. I was able to buy Yamazaki 12 at places like BevMo. The price was still reasonable, at first... $35, about the same as I paid at a liquor store Tokyo, adjusting for exchange rate.
But then Japanese whiskeys got stupid popular in the US. Actually, all whiskey got popular. In the early/mid '10s in the US whiskey had become the "it" drink. And Japanese whiskey became what the self-styled whiskey sophisticates drank to show the whiskey mass-market drinkers how they were more sophisticated because they'd already gone beyond the traditional Scotch and Irish whiskeys everyone else was celebrating. Soon the mass market drinkers wanted in on Japanese whiskey, too. The result was the comparatively small Japanese production houses sold out so much of their liquor that age-statement whiskeys like Yamazaki 12 became extremely rare.
Long story short: The Yamazaki 12 year is now a $200 bottle, too!
I wish I'd bought a few more bottles when they were $35. Alas I only have the one, and there are only maybe two shots left in it. I'll have to drink them with intention.
Once I saw how much the price of Yamazaki 12 year had inflated I was curious about another, even more expensive Japanese whiskey I also picked up umpteen years ago.
This Hibiki 17 year was about $85 when I bought it in Japan in 2010. That was the most expensive bottle I'd bought up to that point. Adjusting for inflation it'd be $125 today, which is still more than I've paid for any bottle. But inflation is not the only story here.
As with the Yamazaki 12, Suntory sold so much Hibiki when it was stupid-popular that they sold out most of their back-stock. Hibiki 17 has been discontinued. Bottles now sell for $800+. 😳
