When a single bottle crosses an auction block for the price of a car, people notice. Rare tequila's recent high-water marks have the trade openly comparing agave to the rare-whisky market that minted fortunes over the last fifteen years.
The case for
Several ingredients of a genuine collectibles market are now in place: genuine scarcity (single-estate and vintage-dated releases in tiny quantities), verifiable provenance (named growers, NOMs, harvest years), and a maturing connoisseur base trading up into the ultra-premium tier, which is the only part of the category still growing. Vintage-dated projects from respected grower-distillers behave, increasingly, like fine wine.
The case against
Collectibles markets are cyclical and story-driven, and tequila is early. Much of the 'luxury' shelf is design-led, ceramic decanters and filtered cristalinos whose value lives in the packaging, not the liquid, and which purists argue are the least ageworthy expressions in the category. Whisky's flipping bubble showed how quickly secondary prices can wobble when the hype outruns the drinking demand underneath it.
How to think about it
If you're buying to drink, none of this should change your behavior: chase quality and transparency, not scarcity. If you're buying to hold, apply the whisky lesson, provenance and liquid quality age well; marketing does not. The bottles most likely to hold value are the ones a connoisseur would actually want to open: limited, honestly made, and traceable to a real place and a real person.