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Wine Auction
Article Posted: Tuesday August 21st
Article last updated on: Tuesday August 21st
Buying wines at Auctions
Clifford Mould, a regular bidder at the London Auction Houses, reveals how it's done. The monthly sale room reports in the glossy wine magazines revel in the premium bids for such rarities as a double magnum of Chateau Petrus 1945 sold at Sotheby's for stg13,200, or the 1.85 million dollar inaugural sale that Christie's held in New York. At this sale, 99,300 dollars was paid for a small but perfectly formed collection of Crus from the domaine de la Romanee-Conti. Such mega-bids attract attention, not to say envy, and of course they rightly enhance the reputation of these long established London auction houses. The pity is that such reporting obscures the very real opportunities that exist for the ordinary wine buyer to pick up some rare bargains. The mecca for bargain hunters is probably the Old Brompton Road sale rooms of Christie's in South Kensington, where there are monthly sales of vintage port, fine wines and bin ends, on Mondays at five o'clock. One of the more enjoyable features are the pre-sale tastings, (you must purchase a catalogue to gain admittance) which begin at four p.m. Presale tastings
There is often a wide range of wines on taste. The first presale tasting I ever attended was at Sotheby's, when I was rewarded with a slurp of 1923 Pomerol and also the 1966 Lafite and Cheval Blanc. Pulling out a Christie's South Kensington catalogue from last year (1994) at random, I had scribbled notes on Gruaud-Larose and Talbot from 1982 and 1985, and various Beaunes from the Domaine Gaston Boisseaux, from 1976, 1978 and 1982. There was also Savigny as well as Pommard from 1988 and 1991, a grand Cru Valmur Chablis 1991, and the Mondavi Fume Blanc 1986. There are usually between five and six hundred lots at these sales, ranging from clarets and sauternes, red and white Burgundies, fine examples from the Loire Valley, Alsace and the Rhone, as well as a few rather special wines from further afield, usually the USA, Australia and South Africa. Claret prices surge upwards
There is no doubt that claret prices have risen steeply in recent months as I noticed at the sale on the 24th of April. Someone with plenty of butter on his bread paid 1,012 pounds for a single bottle of Mouton-Rothschild 1945, but this was in the run-up to the golden jubilee of VE day, so the circumstances were pretty exceptional! Nevertheless, at the same sale someone picked up a case of the very tasty Ch Verdignan 1985 for stg90, or Haut-Batailly 1985 for stg143, and the prices I'm quoting include the ten per cent buyer's premium. Other bargain vintages at the April sale included Ch Franc-Mayne 1988 at stg82.50, Ch de Sours 1990 for only stg54, some wonderful Burgundies and Rhones (Gevrey Les Cazetieres 1990 stg264, Cote-Rotie Les Jumelles 1988 from Jaboulet stg 159, and Beaune-Greves l'Enfant Jesus for twleve pounds a bottle). American readers will be fascinated to hear that Chateau Woltner Estate Vineyards Chardonnay 1985 fetched a mere eighty pounds a case, but six bottles of the Aussie blockbuster, grange Hermitage 1989 went for stg308, well over its estimate! Certain items in the catalogue are also subject to the wretched UK Value Added Tax (VAT), and additional 17.5% to pay. Cases can be collected, or delivered to UK addresses for five pounds each, and deliveries to other countries can be arranged on request. Do your homework
To get the best from a sale you have to do your homework. Order a sale catalogue well in advance, but don't expect it to arrive much more than a week before the sale. Locate the lots that interest you, then start to shop around your favourite merchant's lists to see what the current retail prices are. Compare these prices with the estimates in the catalogue, and do not forget to add on the buyer's premium, VAT and possible delivery charges. Write down in the catalogue the most you'd be prepared to pay for the wine and don't exceed your target, there's always another sale. If you're visiting the sale for the first time, get one of the wine department staff to place bids on your behalf, that way you won't be tempted or get carried away. The nice thing about buying wine at auction is the friendliness of the wine department staff. They will advise on the value of lots, tell you about estates which you've not heard of, and they are simply brilliant at sorting out my complicated bids. I didn't attend a very recent sale at Christie's, because I reckoned that after Wine Magazine's lunchtime mega-tasting of 1985 and 1986 champagnes from over twenty of the top houses, I couldn't be trusted within earshot of an auctioneer's hammer. so I called Nicholas Martineau on Monday morning and put down bids on lots 250 and 167, then if those failed either lot 346, or 363. Then I'd like 430 or 432 and only if I got 430, 433 as well. Sort that out, Nicholas, I said, and he did with his usual nonchalent efficiency. Brian Ebbeson and Carolyn Holmes are equally helpful, and David Elswood, the auctioneer, is relaxed and avuncular. Oh my god! I've bought a jereboam of Yquem!
There's absolutely no need to worry about getting an itch on your ear and having a case of Petrus knocked down to you for four and a half grand! Elswood fixes you with his beady eye, and contact is robust and clear. On the rare occasions when there appears to be the slightest doubt about a bidder's intentions, he happily backtracks without ever embarrasing his clients. Auctioneers in the classroom
Both Christie's and Sotheby's run wine education programmes. The most prestigious of Christie's courses are their master classes, where world class experts present top wines from their field of specialism. The recent opportunity to taste eight vintages from Pichon Lalande in the company of Michael Broadbent MW was one such occasion that was not to be missed. Broadbent is the eminence gris of English winetasters and writers. His many books include his exhaustive tasting notes published in "The Great Vintage Wine Book II", has been much decorated by the French who have awarded him the Ordre National du Merite, the Grand Prix de l'Academie du Vin and the Gold medal of the City of Paris. A Michael Broadbent tasting is an act of worship at the shrine of Bacchus. At the start, the great man warned us to stay in line, and not to get ahead of him. The worst thing you can do is to be seen slurping when you should only be sniffing. Or sniffing when you should still be looking. Questions must be saved up until the very end, and then only the bold and the brave dare ask them in public, out loud. The great man, resplendent in the best suiting that Saville Row can provide is truly the Master of Wine. His wife is always in attendance. She writes down his pronouncements, and actually times each one of them, so that the observation of how the nose of a particular sample has evolved during the past hour is minutely documented. It's easy to make light of this high seriousness, but it is this very attention to meticulous detail that has helped sustain his position in the wine world. In fact, Broadbent is not without humour. What he does not like is distraction, and I think that a large tutored tasting with fifty or sixty people present could easily get out of hand without such discipline. * Click on the highlight for a review of Michael Broadbent's vertical tasting of great vintages from Chateau Pichon Longueville Comtesse de la Lalande PIY, or Pour-it-yourself! The contrast between this rather formal event (where the chief pourer was none other than Stephen Spurrier) and the presale tasting of a huge sale of wines made under the direction of Jean-Michel Cazes could not be more marked. The Cazes presale tasting was a great big PIY (pour-it-yourself) free-for-all. Well, not quite, because I did notice that the great and the good had been invited a half hour earlier, so that they could get round in comfort before the hoi poloi were allowed in. But even a free-for-all has style when it takes place at Christie's headquaters in King Street St James's. The setting is the Great Room, with its walls lined with magnificent old master pictures which will be auctioned later in the week. You have to move swiftly if you are to sample most of what is on offer. On this occasion, the vendors, AXA Millesme, had been most generous, and there were replacement bottles of most wines. Since it's PIY, there is a great deal of polite elbowing, and the crush of people makes it hard to get near a spittoon. There are plenty of city types who are there for the booze and think spitting is an aberrant affectation of the wine snob. An old friend of mine who does genuinely buy at auctions quite literally bumped into me at the end of the evening. At his great age, so he says, he has no intention whatsoever of spitting out anything so rare and distinguished. He remarked, rather lamely I thought, that his knees were giving out. As I was plainly sober, I poured him into a taxi and decanted him into Waterloo Station. He tottered onto a train which bore him away to Oblivion or some such Surrey commuter town. Such are the pleasures of the auction hunter. Rewarding, frustrating, and you make new friends who swig and slurp with you before competing with you later on. The cut and thrust is part of the fun, and if you can keep your head, and your wits about you, you will find the experience most rewarding. * The review of the Pichon Longueville tasting includes some brief notes on the
J-M Cazes/AXA Milleseme tasting.
* Clifford Mould reviews an important tasting of Grand Cru Sauternes from 1985, 1986, 1988, 1989 and 1990 London wine sales in June:
* 8th Christie's King Street St James's.
* 12th Christie's at the Chartered Accountants' Hall in the City of London
* 14th Sotheby's, Bond Street
* 22nd Christie's King Street St James's
* 26th Christie's South Kensington
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