Romanée-Conti leads the way as thirst for rare wine and whisky drives surge in auction sales

Remember the legendary 1945 Romanée-Conti burgundy that sold for US$558,000 at a Sotheby’s auction last autumn? It turns out it’s part of a boom in the wine auction market, driven by voracious demand for burgundy and the appeal of single-owner cellars. 

Sotheby’s 2018 Wine Market Report, released on Monday, is filled with numbers that are all big, bigger and biggest. For one, the company’s global wine auction sales surged more than 50 per cent in 2018, to US$98 million, up from US$67 million in 2017. More than half of that was in Hong Kong, where sales doubled from the previous year.

Although Sotheby’s sold fewer lots in 2018, the average price per lot increased 67 per cent.

“We didn’t foresee the surge,” says Jamie Ritchie, worldwide head of Sotheby’s global wine business. “What drove prices were the phenomenal single-owner cellars offered, and how strong the market is for mature wines with verifiable provenance.” Or as he later put it, “We crushed it in 2018.”

These single-owner collections can command top dollar because they’re assumed to have been kept in better storage conditions and are less likely to contain fakes.

Last year, Sotheby’s nearly doubled its number of single-owner sales, to 13 – the most auctions it has ever held in a year. Altogether they fetched US$56 million. Three of them accounted for more than half of that total: the Philanthropist’s Cellar, a collection of Château Lafite and Mouton Rothschild, among others; the personal cellar of burgundy producer Robert Drouhin; and the cellar from the estate of Jerry Perenchio, which auctioned the personal collection of the entrepreneur who sold Univision Communications for US$13.5 billion in 2007.

“And clients were buying to consume, not just for investment,” adds Ritchie. “We see a strong market overall with stable pricing, if financial markets remain stable.”

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