I know when I am beaten, and probably 100 lots into this auction, I had just about given up. Apart from the sound of the keys of my calculator, as I repriced my Burgundy collection, I sat silently in front of my computer in awe, as prices regularly quadrupled high estimate.
Sotheby’s have that nasty auctioneer habit of underestimating wines, in the mistaken belief that it will draw people in looking for a bargain, if the wines fall through the cracks. In this case, it would have taken a major snowstorm and a computer blackout on the east coast for a single bargain to rear its head. Even so, I did try. I had marked my catalog with 23 bids.
In the end, I managed two actual bids, everything else was way over my high from absentee bids taken in the pre-auction. And as for the two bids I did make, they were fraught with danger. I may have pressed $1100 on one, but bidding was so fast that between the time of positioning the mouse and the click, they recorded my bid at $1700. Didn’t matter, the lot sold for $3200.
Not surprisingly, the really old wines did incredibly well. Stott has been buying for decades, well before the current spate of forgers. Also, the wines were checked several times. Provenance was about as good as it gets, and buyers paid a serious premium for it. What was surprising were the younger wines. A Roumier Amoureuses 2005, retailing for around $2500 a bottle ended up selling for over $70,000 a case.
So I was beaten. As consolation, I bought 3 bottles of Figeac 1966 from a local retailer, and will go for a well earned nap.