Revealed: The former military bunker now being used to store Hong Kong's finest wines
The city's rise to wine auction capital of the world has brought fine vintages with it. Simon Parry visits the first former military bunker to be converted for storing bottles
It is the unlikeliest of Aladdin's Caves. Dimly lit by orange bulbs and buried 15 metres beneath a nondescript Hong Kong hillside, it is coated with 2.5 metres of reinforced concrete encasing a half-inch shell of steel that might comfortably withstand a nuclear onslaught.
As the reinforced door at the end of an underground tunnel creaks open, all there is to see in the meticulously climate-controlled 1,000 sq ft space is row after row of functional metal shelving with cardboard boxes and wooden crates in orderly piles reaching almost to a ceiling of cold steel beams and huge rivets.
Peer through the gloom at the nearest crate, however, and the dazzling extent of the hidden treasure within this former military bunker takes shape in the form of a six-litre Methuselah of Romanée-Conti 1989 with a handwritten label on it recording the price it has just fetched at auction: HK$700,000.
That is the value of just one of the 25,000 bottles stored in this single bunker at Crown Wine Cellars, in Shouson Hill, the first wine storage facility in Hong Kong created from a blast-proof munitions storage facility. The bunker was built in the 1930s by the British Army's Royal Engineers.
"We have more than one million bottles of wine," says the company's managing director and co-founder, Gregory De'eb, referring to the stock held in eight underground bunkers in Shouson Hill and a larger, modern facility in western Kowloon. "Conservatively, [the stock] is worth more than HK$1 billion.
"You are looking at at least HK$1,000 a bottle. At the top end, we have two [of the] most expensive [bottles] ever sold in one of our vaults … 1869 Chateau Lafite standard-sized bottles [750ml] sold by Sotheby's in October 2010, and they achieved US$232,692 per bottle."