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The hall is somewhat hidden in an industrial park near the border with Belgium and Holland.

Inside, a large empty room with a single metal shelf and a couple of pallets.

At the very back is a black van from which a man is hastily loading brown cardboard boxes, tearing them open and repacking the contents.

A scene like from a crook movie.

The boss is about to come, and then usually someone is shot.

The encounter with Neil Porter is far less exciting.

He's not even wearing the green kilt from the official company photos, but black jeans and sneakers.

The 29-year-old works for the Scottish company Whiskey Auctioneer, the hidden hall is the new basis for business in core Europe.

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“The yield of our last tour,” he says with a nod towards the van.

On Saturday in Ibbenbüren he relieved a wealthy man on his country estate from a small part of his collection, of course by mutual agreement: “A total of 84 bottles.

Should bring in £ 200,000 to £ 250,000. "

Porter has long since got used to such sums.

The Internet auction house Whiskey Auctioneer auctions rare whiskey bottles on a commission basis on behalf of collectors around the world.

At breathtaking prices.

To tell this story correctly, one would actually have to travel to Craigellachie, Scotland.

There, on the banks of the Spey, a whiskey was distilled 94 years ago in one of the oldest legal distilleries in the country, which was only bottled 60 years later under the label "The Macallan".

One of them ended up with a private collector in Colorado, USA.

A "Macallan" was auctioned for more than a million dollars

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After his death, his widow put the collection up for auction.

A few months ago, for example, a bottle of “Macallan 1926 Valerio Adami 60 Years” went under the hammer and became the first schnapps in history to be auctioned for more than a million dollars on the Internet.

The spectacular conclusion was an accolade for the auctioneer Whiskey Auctioneer.

Founded just seven years ago by a young whiskey trader from Edinburgh, the auction platform, one of the largest in the world, claims to have annual sales of 45 million euros.

At the last monthly auction alone, which ended last Monday, over 8,700 bottles came under the hammer, for a total of around 3.4 million euros.

The auctioneer himself earns from the fees and commissions.

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The crisis year 2020 is a record year for whiskey speculation.

Negative interest rates and the search for crisis-proof investments drive people into tangible assets, and that includes not only precious metals and old watches but also whiskey bottles.

Then there is the specter of Brexit.

Most of the major whiskey auction houses are at the source, in Scotland or England.

The EU in turn is the largest market for Scottish whiskey with imports of 1.65 billion euros, and the secondary market is correspondingly large.

For fear of a possible no-deal Brexit, which did not occur, Porter ended up in Ratheim in the Heinsberg district at the beginning of the year.

There, as General Manager, he builds up his company's mainland business, drives the van across the country and unearths the hidden treasures of private collectors or their relatives.

He even speaks a little German, his mother comes from southern Germany.

Abstinence pays off

We could toast that now, but the Scot leaves it at that, with his fingertips, gently caressing a dark red shimmering bottle of Japanese whiskey, aged 50 years in the barrel.

"It's actually a shame that these wonderful drops will probably never be drunk."

Because unfortunately it is abstinence that pays off in the whiskey business.

Anyone who corks a good bottle from a well-known distillery and leaves it lying around has, in retrospect, achieved a nice return.

For bottles that could be bought for 100 euros twenty years ago, today 2000 euros and more can regularly be achieved.

Limited editions increase the price.

When a distillery has to close, prices go through the roof.

“However, the tax office discovered the subject of whiskey a long time ago.

You are quickly considered to be a commercial trader, ”says Thomas Krüger.

The 61-year-old, a fourth-generation businessman, makes no secret of the fact that he horrifies the rampant whiskey speculation.

In 1997, in the early days of the internet, he started the world's first online auction offer for whiskey in his northern German homeland.

To date, his platform Whiskyauction.com is the largest of its kind in mainland Europe, with annual sales growth of 20 percent.

The fact that the Scots are now spreading in Germany, he views with suspicion, like so many developments in his business.

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Collecting whiskey is first and foremost a wonderful hobby for me, ”claims Krüger, who himself has collected around 8,000 bottles in over 40 years.

He has set up a small whiskey museum near Rendsburg in Schleswig-Holstein, where he can spend hours telling about the wood quality of famous single barrels or hidden treasures of the Prohibition era.

But what he sees today on the world market has little to do with all of this.

“It's all about speculative profits”, complains Krüger, even the distilleries have partly committed themselves to commercialization.

"How a whiskey tastes no longer matters."

Auctions also attract fraudsters

The quick money definitely arouses criminal energy.

There is a lively trade in empty original bottles, which are then filled with cheap supermarket whiskey or even tea for high sums of money.

Krüger therefore has suspicious bottles screened by scientists from Kiel University using spectral analysis.

Such a device would have been used by the Chinese millionaire, who spent almost 10,000 euros in a Swiss hotel for a glass of single malt from an unopened bottle that supposedly came from 1878.

Later it turned out: The expensive drop was not 50 years old.

Such a thing cannot happen to you with a certified bottle from Whiskey Auctioneer.

At least that's what Neil Porter claims and refers to the whiskey experts at his company, who carefully examine the bottles before the auction.

But they are not allowed to try.

That would just be too expensive.

This text is from WELT AM SONNTAG.

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