Lately, even Buffalo Trace Bourbon–a product that straddles the line between premium and mass market whiskeys, in much the same way that Knob Creek, Elijah Craig and Woodford Reserve do–has sometimes been scarce on store shelves and commands a market value approximately the same as the official pricing on Weller 12! Blanton’s disappeared from store shelves a couple of years ago the official price is $65, while the market value is $150. In time, this gap between Buffalo Trace’s official prices and the actual market value spread to their other products, and then continued to widen. Today, that market value has risen to almost ten times more than the official price point, to $382. Which is to say, four times its official price. About four years ago, this market price of Weller 12 was $150 a bottle, on par with the official price of a bottle of Michter’s 10 Year Old Single Barrel Rye and Bourbon and other, similar expressions in its class. “Market value” is a term I use to describe what one would pay a retailer to acquire said bottle on demand it does not refer to the unofficial and illegal secondary market. The official price bears no visible connection to what people are willing to pay for a bottle.

However, that is just keeping pace with inflation and costs the market value of Weller 12 is far, far higher. Make no mistake, the price has risen steadily over the years, and is now officially set at $40. When Ozersky wrote his article, Weller 12 Year Old was just $26 a bottle.

Weller disappeared from store shelves, the official prices on those products didn’t change. The peculiar thing was that even as first Weller 12 Year Old and then all other expressions named W.L. Perhaps it was inevitable that this would happen, but demand for all things named Weller grew exponentially after that. Weller 12 Year Old “Baby Pappy,” thereby expanding the gathering Pappy Fever to include Buffalo Trace’s other wheated bourbons. In my mind, that transition to all their whiskeys becoming scarce began in 2014, when the late Josh Ozersky dubbed W.L. Although the Buffalo Trace Antique Collection (BTAC) and Pappy Van Winkle have enjoyed such demand that one needed to put their name on a waiting list to get a bottle as far back as 20 years ago, it is only in the last several years that the distillery’s normal products became scarce commodities.

Buffalo trace whiskey price