It’s tempting to say it’s all marketing and hype – and at a certain level, it is – but there are also some peculiarities of the production process that make some whiskeys more costly to produce than others, plain and simple.
Raw ingredients represent a tiny portion of the overall cost of the whiskey. Really high-end, fastidious craft producers sourcing organic grain grown by local farmers might pay three or four dollars a bottle for their inputs; most producers pay way, way less. Other costs related to production are things like utilities, rent, and labor – the same costs faced by every business. In general, these costs are also a minimal part of the final price, although very small producers lose out on the economies of scale big facilities enjoy, so their labor and overhead costs are, proportionately, higher.
Where production really eats into a distillery’s costs is age. Not only to distillers need to maintain facilities for storage (as you may imagine, the permitting required to run a warehouse packed to the gills with flammable materials isn’t exactly cheap & easy), they also need to contend with evaporative loss, the infamous angels’ share. In other words, the older something is, the rarer it becomes, and distillers need to have a good reason to leave their product in storage for long enough that it starts to go missing.
That reason, of course, is a price premium. Oh, and because it tastes amazing. But distillers need to charge more per bottle to make up the difference in volume they lost.
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