London Wine Collection Auctions
Published March 19th, 2007
Wines from more than 20 vintages of Chateau Petrus spanning four decades, as well as other top Pomerols, Medocs, Burgundies and Rhones, may drive demand at London auctions featuring two private cellars this month.
Sotheby’s estimates bottles from the estate of the late British collector Adrian Bowden will fetch between 800,000 pounds ($1.55 million) and 1 million pounds at a sale March 29. Wines owned by the photographer Lord Lichfield come under the hammer at Christie’s a week earlier.
The sales from the private collections come as investors are paying close attention to the authenticity of historic wines, amid an investigation in the U.S. into alleged counterfeits.
“The wines are in fantastic condition because they didn’t go from pillar to post,'’ said Serena Sutcliffe, head of Sotheby’s international wine department. “It’s the ideal scenario; we like to know where the wines come from.'’
Bowden, who died in 1995, had homes in London and near Oxford and collected wine for more than 20 years, Sotheby’s said. Apart from Burgundy and Bordeaux, he was one of the first wine aficionados in the U.K. to invest in top Rhones. The auction house sold part of his cellar in 1998, raising 570,000 pounds.
More than a quarter of the value of the Sotheby’s sale may come from the 24 Petrus vintages on offer spanning more than four decades. The oldest are six bottles from 1953, estimated to fetch between 3,600 and 4,600 pounds in total. The most recent are from 1994.
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