The cellar took three decades to build. It will take one day to sell. Just over 1,700 bottles from a single American collector go under the hammer at Christie’s New York today, Friday, October 23, in The Distinguished Cellar of an American Connoisseur.
Single-owner sales are the auctions serious students of wine watch most closely: one story of provenance instead of a hundred. The collector, unnamed in the sale materials, began buying from Christie’s in the 1990s and recorded where every bottle came from. “He was fastidious in his approach, documenting the provenance of each wine,” says Chris Munro, senior vice president of Christie’s wine department in New York. He bought at some of the most important sales of the 20th century, from respected collections, industry titans and the vineyards’ own cellars.
He drank the wine, too. Menus saved from his table record a dinner of 10 courses, each paired with a French wine from 1959, a vintage Christie’s counts among France’s greatest: grilled venison with Château Haut-Brion, braised beef short ribs with Château Mouton Rothschild, and Roquefort with Château d’Yquem.
The bottles to watch
The summit of the sale is the 1945 Château Mouton Rothschild, made when the estate was still ranked a second growth; just under 75,000 bottles were produced. Each carried a label commissioned by Baron Philippe de Rothschild to mark the Allied victory and his own return from exile. Michael Broadbent, the critic who founded Christie’s wine department, tasted the wine more than 20 times across 40 years and called it “simply unmistakable.” Munro is direct about its standing: “This is considered by many to be the best Bordeaux in history.”
A full case of 1982 Petrus, still in its original wooden case, may draw the day’s sharpest bidding. The dozen bottles were bought on late release and shipped straight from Bordeaux to the collector’s cellar, where they remain. One owner, one cellar, no detours. “It’s so rare to see a full case of Petrus from any vintage of this era,” Munro says.
Burgundy answers with a three-bottle set of 1999 Romanée-Conti, from a 1.8-hectare vineyard that yielded fewer than 7,000 bottles that year, and two full cases of Domaine Leflaive’s 1989 Chevalier-Montrachet. The Rhône sends six bottles of Jean-Louis Chave’s 1991 Ermitage Cuvée Cathelin, from a total production of about 2,500 bottles. Australia sends a 1966 Penfolds Grange, from the year Penfolds was first imported to Britain.
Sixty years of selling wine
Christie’s has sold wine since its first auction in 1766, when James Christie’s Pall Mall rooms offered Madeira and “high Flavour’d Claret” and every lot sold. The dedicated department arrived 200 years later, in 1966, under Broadbent, who wrote nearly 100,000 tasting notes in the job. “He was the authority,” Munro says. “If you had a question about an old wine, he was the person you went to.” The anniversary has run all season: Christie’s Hong Kong sold the cellar of Henry Tang on October 10.
How to follow the sale
Bidding runs in the room, by telephone, and online through Christie’s LIVE, with absentee bids open on the sale page. Christie’s tells the story behind the collection in its anniversary feature. Readers who follow the table as closely as the cellar will know most of these names from the wine lists of rooms like Atlanta’s Avize. The lesson of this sale is the collector’s habit rather than his budget: buy the best provenance you can, write everything down, and keep the bottles still.
“This is one of the most celebrated cellars we’ve offered in recent memory,” Munro says. By the close of bidding, it will belong to everyone who raised a paddle, one documented bottle at a time.
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