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.
Initially he kept his collection in a London cellar, but he brought it to California when he moved there. Over the years, he has tried to acquire at least two bottles of every release—one to keep and one to open and actually enjoy. He points to his collection of Black Label bottles as being of particular interest, and one that really showcases how the whisky has changed over the years (the 1930s era is one of his favorites).
“I’ve had probably every decade from the 1920s to the 2020s,” Op den Kamp told Robb Report. “I think that you can see the difference in the depth of the blend in terms of what stock they had available. They always maintained it at 12 years old, but the volume of stocks that they had at the time in the ’50s, because of the Second World War, was much less than they had in the ’80s to draw from… Obviously, whiskey doesn’t age in the bottle, so you’re capturing a piece of time when you open an old bottle.”
Ultimately, Op den Kamp made the decision to sell his collection because he feels like he achieved his goals as a collector—and, frankly, he’s running out of space. But it wasn’t necessarily an easy decision. “If you spend that much time and invest that much energy and passion into something over a couple of decades, then it definitely is a loss,” he said. “A small part of me goes with the collection as well.”
Of course, that void might be filled with a big payday. The entire collection, which is called “The Johnnie Walker Collection: One Hundred Years of Striding,” will be available via auction website Whisky Auctioneer starting September 11. “The sheer breadth of the collection is a testament to Frans’ 20 years of dedication,” said Joe Wilson, head curator and spirits specialist at Whisky Auctioneer, in a statement. “Bringing together this level of completeness is an extraordinary achievement and there’s something here to spark an interest at every level, offering a fascinating way into the world of whisky collecting.”