A 12-bottle case of Romanee-Conti 1988 Domaine de la Romanee-Conti grand cru Burgundy may fetch as much as £130,000 ($158,000) at a Christie’s International Plc auction in London this month as collector appetite remains high for rare mature wines from the region.
Two similar bottles may sell for £22,000, a magnum of the same producer’s 2005 vintage could fetch £20,000 and a single bottle of its 1999 wine may sell for £15,000, according to the auction house’s catalog.
The sale, which also includes historic wines direct from the cellars of Chateau Figeac in Saint Emilion, as well as from the reserves of its owners, the Manoncourt family, comes as fine wine prices continue to rally after a 40 per cent drop in many top Bordeaux wines since 2011. A survey by the London-based Liv-ex market showed its members expect further gains in the benchmark Liv-ex 100 Index this year after a 25 per cent rebound in 2016.
“On average, respondents expect the industry benchmark Liv-ex 100 Index to increase by 7.8 per cent this year,” Liv-ex said in a market blog on its website. “This would represent a second year of strong gains for the market.”
Six bottles of Petrus 1982 from Bordeaux’s Pomerol appellation may sell for £22,000 at the Christie’s auction while a 12-bottle case of Chateau Margaux 1982 and a six-bottle lot of Le Pin 1996 could each fetch £9,000, according to the catalog.
From the Figeac collection, 12 bottles of the 1982 vintage may fetch £3,000, according to the catalog, while a magnum of the estate’s 1947 wine and three separate three-bottle lots of the 1949, 1959 and 1961 vintages, all re-corked at the chateau, may each sell for £1,500.
“The vintages date back many decades and encompass the whole period during which Thierry Manoncourt held the reins of the property,” wine author Anthony Hanson wrote in the catalog’s introduction to the sale. The auction will take place 16 March.
News by Bloomberg, edited by Hospitality Ireland
