Late yesterday afternoon, I drove to Manchester airport to pick up my folks, who were returning from a holiday on an awesome little greek island. A few weeks ago, I'd driven my car over to my folks' house, left it there, and driven them to the airport in one of their cars. Doing it that way meant they didn't have to pay the extortionate parking rates at the airport, or worry about taxis, trains and buses, and it also meant I got to drive their car, which is pretty awesome -- better than mine, at least -- for the last three weeks.

As a present for looking after their car, and keeping an eye on their house and cats every so often (they live less than an hour from my place), and just because they're cool like that anyway, they brought me back a litre of Jim Beam Black (which is quite hard, but by no means impossible, to acquire normally in the UK -- Jim Beam White is available everywhere).

Whisky Exchange, by way of example, sells the 700ml bottles of Jim Beam Black for £20 (or $40.11), and the 1 litre bottles for £28 (or $56.15).

Nothing particularly exceptional so far, but, in passing, my Mum mentioned the other whisk(e)ys available, in case I wanted to place an order for the next time they went out, and also mentioned their prices. It turns out that a litre of Jim Beam Black can be acquired in Greece for €22 (or £14.88, or $29.84). Other brands have equivalent mark-ups.

I asked my Mum to keep an eye out for Old Potrero (something Blixco recommended a while ago) on her next trip. I have no great hopes of it being there -- it's much rarer than even Jim Beam Black in the EU -- but who knows? It's worth a shot.

Lets stay there, though; on the subject of Old Potrero. In the UK, Old Potrero can be found for about £68 ($136.34) for a 750ml bottle if you're lucky -- or about £90 ($180.44) if you aren't. In the US, on the other hand, you can get it for about $60-$65 (£30-£32.40).

I've spent a bit of time trying to figure out the reasons for this over the last year or so. Part of it is shipping cost, part of it is to do with import tariffs, part of it is to do with economical disparities in the exchange rates and part of it, especially in the UK, is to do with a fairly draconian additional tax added on to both the sale and the production of spirits. The Scottish Whisky Association has, for years, been appealling to get the whisky-specific production tariffs reduced -- something Gordon Brown has promised to look into, being a Scot -- on the basis that it cripples their industry uniquely.

It's not all one-way traffic, either. Scotch Whisky sometimes goes through an analogous -- although, importantly, not equivalent -- inflation when headed in the other direction. The basic, 700ml, ten-year Laphroaig can cost anywhere between $30 (£14.95) and $60 (£28.90) in the U.S., which compares either very favourably, or not very favourably with the UK supermarket price of around £20. Either way, the mark-up, if it exists, is almost never of similar magnitude.

The keen-eyed will have noticed something, however: Greece is in the EU. The only tariffs which apply in Britain which do not also apply to the rest of the EU are those specific ones set by the Treasury (shipping to Greece is certainly no less than it is to the UK, and is quite often more) -- and, by-and-large, those UK-specific tariffs are still nowhere near enough to explain the disparity between the cost of whisk(e)y in the UK and the cost elsewhere. Again, by way of comparison, the standard Laphroaig can be acquired in Greece for €21 (£14.20, or $28.48), notably more than the Jim Beam Black (which is far more expensive than the Laphroaig in the UK), but still vastly less than the lowest UK street prices.

There seems, as with many other goods (e.g. cars) to be an elusive but incumbent "UK cost", where someone -- and I still haven't quite figured out who -- slaps a UK-specific premium on top of the flat cost simply by dint of a given sale happening within the territory of her Maj.

[Note: Conversions were done via XE.com, which updates in real-time, so there's a moderate margin of error on many of these conversions from one moment to the next]