Fine French wine to fetch £2m at auction
Fine French wine to fetch £2m at auction
Some of the best
Bordeaux ever produced among the 291 lots on offer at sale organised by Farr
Vintners
A four-day auction of
one of the finest private collections of wines ever seen in the United Kingdom
begins tomorrow, with total bids expected to exceed £2m.
Some of the best
Bordeaux ever produced are on offer, including two cases of 1990 Château
Pétrus, the wine
recently laid on for David Cameron and friends by the Tory party treasurer,
Michael Spencer, at their party conference in Birmingham. The cases have a
reserve price of £34,000 each.
Potential buyers have
submitted sealed bids in the hope of securing some of the 291 lots. The most
expensive case is the 1961 Latour at £40,000 – perhaps to be expected, as
American wine critic Robert Parker gave the wine a perfect score of 100 points
on the four occasions he tasted it between 1997 and 2009, when he called it
"unquestionably one of the Bordeaux legends of the century".
Various attempts have
been made by the media to discover the identity of the mystery seller, but the
connoisseur and owner of the collection is remaining anonymous. He is believed
to be British and in his fifties, with a home in London.
Tom Hudson, a
director of Farr Vintners who organised the sale, said it was one of the finest
collections of wine he has ever seen.
"The sheer
quality of the stock is incredible," he said. "These mature wines, in
their original cases, in magnums and jeroboams [three-litre bottles], are of
the best provenance and the condition of some of these is unmatched. Private
cellars of this sort are seldom seen today."
Click on thumbnails to enlarge