A wine collection has the industry fascinated as it sold for a huge amount recently. The wine collection consists of 16,889 bottles and sold for a record-breaking £23 million at a Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong.
To make it even more mysterious, the collector is known only as the ‘Transcendent Collector’, and no-one is sure of their identity.
Wine collection sells for record amount
The high-end wine collection was originally predicted by Sotheby’s to reach a total of £19.9million. This would have set a new world sales record for a collection owned by a single owner. During the three-day sale, the total burst through this estimate and ended up at a truly impressive £23 million.
Sotheby’s describe the collection as on “a scale the like of which has never seen before”. It includes grand cru Burgundies, a large set of Dom Perignon champagnes going back to 1926 and Krug vintages going back six decades.
Other high-end auction lots
The auction also hosted more than 275 lots of the most sought-after Burgundy, Domaine de la Romanee Conti. There were vintages of this wine going back five decades. In 2018, one of this vineyard’s bottles broke its own record when a single one was sold for £426,000 in a New York auction.
According to Sotheby’s there were also sales of La Mission Haut-Brion 1945 Bordeaux, and several bottles of Chateau Lafite 1962. Around 600 lots of Dimoane Coche-Dury also sold, which included Meursalt Perrieres bottled between 1982 and 2014.
New wave of wine collectors
The Head of Wine Sales for Sotheby’s Asia, Adam Bilbey, told Deutsche Welle TV: “We are confident in the quality of the wines and the providence… this particular collector is a shining example of the new wave of collectors in the world.”
However, Sotheby’s also declined to name the wine collector. The wine catalogue from the auction suggests that the seller is a property developer from Asia, but there is no confirmation.
Sales of single-owned wine collections are extremely popular with serious buyers. This is because it’s much easier to establish the provenance of the wines and find out where it was stored. This sort of collection is a rare occurrence in the world of wine auctions.
