Some people are born to be collectors. They might start out with comic books or baseball cards before moving onto stamps or action figures, and a small subsect eventually finds themselves fully immersed in whiskey. That can be a particularly lucrative area, because even though the global whiskey market has slowed down, the auction market remains hot. Frans Op den Kamp is hoping that trend continues, as his collection of more than 3,200 Johnnie Walker bottles and pieces of memorabilia, the largest collection to date at auction, opens for bidding to the public next month. We spoke to him to find out more about his quarter-century journey with the Striding Man.
Op den Kamp started collecting Johnnie Walker around 1999 when he lived in London, and his first acquisition was a bottle of Blue Label that cost him $130 (it runs around $200 nowadays). From there, he started hunting for bottles during his many business trips working in the jewelry business, frequenting duty-free shops and high-end liquor stores around the world, becoming something of a Johnnie Walker expert along the way. The collection eventually expanded to its current size. It includes early 20th-century Old Highland Whisky bottles with red, black, and white labels; single malts from distilleries like Cardhu, Talisker, and Mortlach that reference John Walker on their labels; and the Johnnie Walker Jenson Button Vodafone McLaren Mercedes Signature Blend, one of a set of just 25.
