Wine lovers, do your homework before an auction

Going once … Thanks to its zero-duty status, Hong Kong has grown to be the Asian centre of the wine auction world, setting records every year, with prices for first growth and rare wines reaching stratospheric levels.

The blue-chip wines are, of course, the first growths – chateaux Mouton-Rothschild, Latour, Lafite-Rothschild, Margaux and Haut- Brion. These names come up so frequently it sometimes seems that auction houses are offering the same wines over and over.

What makes a collection unique is the person whose cellar it belonged to (although names are not always released) and, of course, how the wines have been stored and shipped. Current trends in the auction market are leaning towards the rare wines from Burgundy, in France.

But why buy wines at auction? For a buyer, it is an opportunity to access mature wines that are missing from their cellar.

For a selling collector, it is a way of clearing space for other wines they are now more interested in. To the novice, wine auctions can be intimidating, but once you’ve sat in on a few, you’ll realise that the proceedings are quite simple.

First off, do your homework. Look online at an auction house’s catalogue and mark the wines you’re interested in. It will tell you what’s available and the expected price range. Lots can be extremely varied, although they are usually a case, or a vertical (different years), of vintages from the same chateau/house, or a set of the same vintage but from different chateaux.