When he began collecting whisky 20 years ago, Vietnamese businessman Viet Nguyen Dinh Tuan didn’t imagine that he would eventually own a record-breaking collection of whisky.
Vietnamese collector Viet Nguyen Dinh Tuan
Now, the Ho Chi Minh City resident has been declared the Guinness World Record holder for the world’s most valuable whisky collection. Though he owns ‘only’ 535 bottles (there’s a few collections that run into the thousands), many are the world’s rarest and most expensive. The collection is valued at an estimated price of £10,770,635 ($13.9 million). However, including a 21% buyer’s premium if the collection were sold through a U.K. auctioneer like Sotheby’s, the value increases to £13 million ($16.75 million) and it is the figure listed by Guinness.
Viet’s bottles include one of the world’s only complete Macallan Fine & Rare collections, including the iconic 1926 release. The latter recently broke the record for most expensive bottle ever sold at $1.9 million. Viet owns three of them. Other jewels in the collection includes one of 12 bottles of the oldest Bowmore whisky ever released (which also holds the record for the most expensive Islay malt), and one of 24 bottles of a 1919 Springbank, a bottle of which recently sold for £220,000.
Part of his collection
It’s an unexpected honor for Viet: “My first reaction was one of surprise. However, I’m really happy and feel honoured to be recognized by Guinness World Records as the owner of the world’s most valuable whisky collection. It feels like an acknowledgment of all my hard work and dedication over the past 20 years”, he said.
The valuation of the collection was carried out by whisky market analysts and consultants Rare Whisky 101. Each bottle’s open market price was examined, and a realistic estimate was sent to Guinness, assuming the collection was to be auctioned in the U.K. in the current market. Rare Whisky 101 Co-founder Andy Simpson is confident that there’s no collections out there that come close in value to this one:
“There are certainly reasonably well known whisky collections around the world which contain far more bottles from a volume perspective. However, from a pure value perspective, we’re confident this collection is head and shoulders above the rest. Mr Viet is, what we believe to be, one of possibly three collectors in the world to own all three variants of the legendary Macallan 1926 bottling (the Fine & Rare label, the Peter Blake label and the Valerio Adami label), which recently broke the world record. That said, it may well be the case that Mr Viet is the only collector in the world to have three bottles.
The news of this collection arrives on the heels of many recently-broken whisky records. Most significant may have been the collection sold at a Sotheby’s auction by someone mysteriously named ‘The Ultimate Whisky Collector’, whose 1926 Macallan broke the world record for most expensive bottle last month.
However, unlike the Ultimate Whisky Collector, Viet has no intention of giving up his bottles any time soon: “As for my collection, I have no intention of selling any of it. Not one bottle. In fact, I’ll continue to hunt for more old and rare bottles and add to and enrich it.”