beyondbrics

Bordeaux vineyards hoping for an early recovery in prices would be disappointed by the weekend sales in Hong Kong but Burgundy’s top names may be the “new Lafite” as the region’s top wines continue to fetch enthusiastic bids.

At the first major wine auctions in Asia this year, collectors stayed away from the younger vintages of Bordeaux’s best known châteaux, with cases of the 1996 Château Lafite Rothschild unsold.

That is a far cry from 2009 and 2010, when anything carrying the Lafite label would have triggered frenzied bidding by Chinese buyers in particular. The 2008 vintage was fetching £14,500 a case in late 2010 because Lafite had cleverly put the Chinese character for the number 8 – considered lucky in Chinese culture – on the label.

“The auction market is likely to remain tough for Bordeaux because people are paying what they think a wine is worth rather than paying absolutely anything just to gain face,” says Simon Davies, head of marketing at Fine+Rare Wines.

“This is the end of the first act of the new Asian wine market as it takes a breather. Prices of commodity high-end Bordeuax will settle down in the first half of the year as top collectors become more choosy about what they are buying. There is less liquidity and the market is evolving. A historic quantity was sold at historic prices in the last three years which mean that collectors now want to diversify the content of their cellars,” says Robert Sleigh, head of Sotheby’s Wine in Asia.

At Sotheby’s auction on Saturdy, 17 per cent of the 980 lots on offer were unsold, with most of them being post-1995 Bordeaux first growths, which saw prices falling as much as 17 per cent last year.

But at the Friday and Saturday sales conducted by Sotheby’s and Acker Merrall & Condit, the world’s largest wine seller, buyers were still snapping up top Burgundies at prices which topped pre-sale estimates. Collectors consider this class of wine as a good investment not just for its quality but also for the relatively small output compared with “commodity” Bordeaux wines, Sleigh says.

Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (DRC) prices went up by more than a third last year according to wine market tracker Liv-ex but most experts think there’s still room for prices to rise this year.

Acker, which sold around 90 per cent of its 1,000 lots, says three magnums of the 1999 DRC Romanée Conti – Burgundy’s top label – fetched HK$634,400 ($81,333), the highest price ever paid for one lot of that vintage at auction.

But it’s not all gloom for Lafite. Even with the froth taken off the market, old vintages, especially old vintages with a story, will always sell.

At the Ackers auction, a “double magnum” bottle – equivalent to four regular bottles – of the 1870 Lafite Rothschild was sold for Hk$488,000 ($62,564).

This is the vintage “won” by Leon Panetta, US defence secretary, after the killing of Osama bin Laden. Ted Balestreri , a Californian restaurateur, had made a pledge in 2010 to the then CIA chief that he would open the rare bottle from his cellar “if Leon catches Osama bin Laden”. He made good on his promise last November.

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