Before anyone queued for trainers, ripped a pack of cards or waited three years for a Daytona, people collected wine and whisky.

A cellar said something about you. A cask was laid down for a birth, a wedding, a grandchild. Bottles were traded between people who knew each other, and the best ones were talked about for decades.

Wine and whisky were the original collectibles. They still have everything a collectible needs: scarcity, story, craft and time. Every year in the cask makes the whisky inside rarer, and nothing can speed that up.

Every other collectible moved on

Over the last decade, almost every collectible market rebuilt itself around the buyer. StockX gave trainers a live market, with a bid, an ask and a last-sale price on every pair. Chrono24 made pre-owned watches searchable, and Rolex launched its own Certified Pre-Owned programme rather than fight resale.

But the biggest story of all is cards. The trading card market is now estimated at $10 billion to $15 billion. Whatnot, the live-selling app built on cards, sold more than $8 billion in 2025, up from $3 billion the year before, and was valued at $20 billion in August. A record 26.6 million cards were graded last year. Target says its card sales rose nearly 70%. This isn’t a niche. It’s mainstream, and it’s young.

• $10–15bn Estimated size of the trading card market
• $8bn+ Sold on Whatnot in 2025, up from $3bn
• $20bn Whatnot’s valuation, August 2026
• 26.6m Cards graded in 2025, a record

What Fanatics understood

In January 2022 Fanatics bought Topps, a card brand founded in 1938, for around $500 million. Topps had history and loyal collectors. What it didn’t have was a route to the next generation.

Fanatics built one. Exclusive licences with the NFL, NBA, MLB and the Premier League. Live selling through Fanatics Live. A flagship on Regent Street in London. By Sacra’s estimates, its collectibles business reached about $5 billion of revenue in 2025, the most profitable part of a company valued at $31 billion.

The cardboard didn’t change. What changed was everything around it: grading so buyers could trust what they bought, platforms that made selling easy, prices anyone could see, culture that made owning it worth talking about, and access for people who were never in the room before.

Whisky had its moment, and let it slip

Whisky didn’t miss this wave. It rode it. For most of the last decade rare bottles made headlines, online auctions boomed and a new crowd discovered single malt. For a few years whisky was as talked about as any watch or trainer.

The auction records tell the story. In 2017 the UK record for a bottle of whisky was a 65-year-old Dalmore at £95,000. By 2019 a Macallan 1926 had sold for £1.5 million. In November 2023 another Macallan 1926 made around £2.2 million at Sotheby’s, still the most ever paid for a bottle of whisky. Sotheby’s own head of whisky describes huge price rises between 2019 and 2022, followed by a correction.

• £95k UK record for a bottle, 2017
• £1.5m Macallan 1926, 2019
• £2.2m Macallan 1926, November 2023, the world record
• £2.125m Macallan 1926 at the distillery, October 2026

The top of the market is still very much alive. In October 2026, a Macallan 1926 sold for £2.125 million at the first auction held at the distillery itself. Sotheby’s sold $127.5 million of wine and spirits at auction in 2025, up 12% on the year before and more than double the $47 million it sold in 2015.

Then the market cooled. Auction prices fell back towards 2019 levels, and instead of building on the audience it had won, much of the industry went back to what it knew: auction houses, private lists, merchants and introductions. The new collectors were left with nowhere modern to go, so they went back to the apps that made sense to them.

The contrast with cards is hard to ignore. In the same years that Whatnot went from $3 billion to $8 billion of sales and card grading hit record after record, Knight Frank’s luxury index had rare whisky among its weakest collectibles. Fine wine still sits almost 25% below its 2022 peak on the Liv-ex Fine Wine 100. The appetite for collecting didn’t go away. It moved to the categories that built a market for it.

That’s not the end of the story. Think of vinyl. It was the original music collectible, then it lost its moment to CDs, downloads and streaming. Nobody gave it a future. In 2025, US vinyl sales passed $1 billion for the first time since 1983, after 19 straight years of growth. It came back not as a format but as a collectible, bought by a generation that grew up streaming and wanted something they could own.

Whisky already has the vault

Here’s the part most people miss. The smartest money in collectibles right now is going into vaults.

PSA, the biggest card grader, runs a vault in Delaware that it says holds more than $750 million of cards across 1.8 million items sold and stored. Courtyard keeps graded cards in secure storage and lets collectors buy, sell and trade ownership without the card ever leaving the vault. The idea is simple: the physical asset stays safe in one place, and the ownership moves.

That’s exactly how whisky casks have worked for generations. A cask sits in an HMRC-bonded warehouse. It doesn’t move when it’s sold. Ownership passes from one person to another through a delivery order, recorded by the warehouse. Duty isn’t paid until the spirit leaves bond.

In other words, whisky already has the hardest piece of infrastructure the card world is now racing to build: secure, independent custody with a clear record of who owns what. What it never had was a modern market on top of it.

The next collector is already here

A new generation learned to collect on their phones. They expect to see the last sale price, prove what they own, and sell in a few taps. That isn’t a feature to them. It’s the starting point.

And they want wine and whisky. Rare bottles are back as a marker of taste, on dinner tables and on social feeds. Distilleries sell out private casks. Limited releases go to ballot because demand outstrips supply, and a resale market forms within days of release.

• 47% Of Christie’s new clients in H1 2026 were Millennial or Gen Z
• 85% Of Christie’s bids came online
• 1 in 3 Sotheby’s wine and spirits buyers in 2025 were new
• 50% Of those buyers were under 50

Christie’s chief executive calls luxury “a great gateway” for younger buyers. In watches, Millennials and Gen Z now make up roughly a third of bidders at Sotheby’s. The next generation of collectors isn’t coming. It’s already bidding. The question is whether wine and whisky give them a reason to stay.

The demand isn’t the problem. The experience is. A new buyer who comes to whisky today finds private prices, unfamiliar paperwork and no obvious way to sell. So they spend their money somewhere that feels built for them.

That’s the opportunity. The industry doesn’t need to invent new demand. It needs to give the demand that already exists a place to go.

We can already see it on Decant Index

This isn’t a prediction. We can see it in our own numbers.

• Record sign-ups. 11,881 people joined Decant Index between July and September 2026, our biggest quarter ever.
• A younger collector. Among new sign-ups who shared their date of birth, the average age fell from 52 to 54 in 2023 and 2024 to 41 in the third quarter of 2026. In early 2023, about one in eight was under 35. Now it’s about one in three.
• Self-serve buying has taken off. In the first half of 2026, around 18 casks a month sold straight off the marketplace. Since July, it’s been around 72 a month. Marketplace sales from July to October came to £834,000, against £359,000 in the six months before.
• New buyers come in through the marketplace. Of the 246 people who’ve bought on the marketplace since July, 107 had never bought from us before.
• Collectors are trading with each other. Since our order book launched in June, 50 bids have matched directly with asks. Roughly one in five marketplace sales is one client selling to another.

Most of our business is still done with the help of our private client team, and that won’t change. People spending serious money want advice. But the direction is clear. When we give collectors visible prices and an easy way to buy and sell, they use it, and a new kind of collector turns up.

Yes, there’s fraud. There’s fraud in every collectible

The cask conversation has got stuck on one subject. Bad actors exist, and nobody should defend them. But it’s worth keeping a sense of proportion.

• Counterfeit wine and spirits cost legitimate producers in the EU an estimated €2.29 billion in lost sales every year, according to the EU Intellectual Property Office.
• Fake rare whisky is a long-standing problem. When Rare Whisky 101 had 55 vintage Scotch bottles carbon-dated in 2018, 21 were either fake or not distilled in the year on the label.
• Art has lived with forgery for centuries, and no one can even agree how big the problem is.

Nobody responds to that by telling people to stop buying wine, bottles or art. The answer in every one of those markets has been the same: authenticate the product, control the custody, make the price visible.

Casks are no different. Fraud thrives where there’s no public price, no independent proof of ownership and no open way to sell. Fix those three things and the space for bad actors closes. Warning people off just leaves the field to whoever shouts loudest.

What we’ve built

Decant Index is the marketplace the next collector expects, built on the custody the traditional collector trusts. It’s the same playbook, applied to the original collectible.

• Authenticity. Casks sit in our own HMRC-bonded warehouse, Decant Bond in Alloa. Every listing is authenticated and every owner is recorded by name. We hold the asset, the way a vault holds a graded card.
• A platform. Owners list on a public marketplace and sell to any registered buyer, when they choose. No closed loops, no waiting for a broker to call back.
• Visible prices. Anyone can see what a cask is listed at and what comparable casks have sold for, before they spend a penny.
• Access. A first-time collector can start from their phone, and an experienced one gets the custody and provenance they rely on.

Today Decant Index has more than 60,000 registered users, over 7,000 clients and more than £100 million in lifetime sales, and we’ve invested over £4 million in our own technology.

Built in-house, without venture money. We’re not chasing whisky geeks or trying to win over the old guard. We’re building for the people who’ll be collecting for the next forty years. Traditional collectors get the custody and provenance they rely on. New collectors get the experience they already know from StockX and Chrono24.

The original collectible needs a market

Wine and whisky defined collecting for centuries. The product never lost its appeal. The market around it just stopped talking to new buyers.

Every other collectible has shown what happens when you give people transparency, trust and an easy way to take part: the audience grows, and the category gets younger. Whisky deserves the same.

Alistair Moncrieff, Decant Index.

Sources

1. Whatnot raises $545m at a $20bn valuation – Value Added Resource, August 2026
2. Fanatics revenue, valuation and funding – Sacra (estimates)
3. Fanatics valuation hits $31bn after $700m round – Front Office Sports
4. Pokémon cards are becoming a multibillion-dollar market – CoinDesk, August 2026
5. Major authenticators graded more than 26 million cards in 2025 – cllct
6. PSA Vault – PSA
7. StockX valuation jumps to $3.8bn – NBC / CNBC
8. Christie’s and Sotheby’s 2026 half-year results – The Art Newspaper, July 2026
9. Sotheby’s Wine & Spirits Auction Report 2025 – Sotheby’s
10. Macallan 1926 sells for £2.1m at first distillery auction – The Scotsman
11. Macallan 1926: the most expensive bottle of whisky ever sold – Spear’s
12. Knight Frank Wealth Report 2026: luxury collectibles – Elite Traveler
13. Whisky auction prices have fallen back to 2019 levels, DramX says – Vinetur
14. US vinyl sales pass $1bn for the first time since 1983 – Music Week
15. EUIPO: counterfeit wine and spirits cost the EU €2.29bn a year – Cyprus Mail, June 2025
16. Third of rare Scotch whiskies tested found to be fake – Decanter
17. 50 percent art forgery estimate may be exaggerated – Artnet
18. Rolex enters the secondary market with Certified Pre-Owned – Robb Report
19. Ian Macleod Distillers launches Private Client division – The Whisky Wire

Whisky casks are a physical commodity, not a regulated financial product. Cask values can fall as well as rise, and a cask may sell for less than you paid. Decant Index does not give financial, investment or tax advice. 18+ only. Market figures are drawn from the published sources listed above and are market examples, not projections. Decant Index is the trading name of Decant Group Ltd, Company No. 12348943, 105 Piccadilly, London W1J 7NJ.