Château Lafite Rothschild 1869
Wine Auction at Sotheby's Hong Kong Makes History as a Baron's Tipple Fetches $8.4 Million
Madeleine O'Dea
Three bottles of Château Lafite Rothschild 1869 became the most expensive wine ever to be sold at auction when they fetched HK $1,815,000 ($232,692) per bottle in Hong Kong on Saturday night, three times the high presale estimate of HK $65,000. All three bottles were sold by phone to a single Asian bidder whose coup was the highlight of the all-Lafite sale by Sotheby's at which every one of the 284 lots was sold. The auction brought in an extraordinary total of HK $65.5 million ($8.4 million), tripling the high estimate of HK $20 million, and confirming Asia's status as the up-and-comer of the global fine wine market.
The sale also confirmed the almost hypnotic power of the Lafite name in the Chinese market, a phenomenon that nobody is quite able to explain. Serena Sutcliffe, head of Sotheby's international wine department, thinks it may be because the Chateau's name is easy to pronounce in Mandarin. Others say the craze started with the wildly popular 2006 Hong Kong gangster movie "Exiled," in which the anti-hero rejects a glass of wine, snarling that anything less than Chateau Lafite is "garbage." Supporters of this theory say that soon after the release of the movie, fake bottles of Lafite began to flood the Chinese market.
Buyers at the Sotheby's sale had no fears about provenance as the wine was consigned directly from the cellars of Château Lafite Rothschild in Pauillac and the auction at Hong Kong’s opulent Mandarin Oriental hotel was conducted under the gaze of Baron Eric de Rothschild himself, who had flown in especially for the event. Chateau Lafite is sinking deep roots in the Middle Kingdom: it recently forged a partnership with China's largest state-owned investment company, CITIC, to produce wine on the peninsula of Penglai in the Shandong Province.
This is part of an assiduous campaign by the vintners to drive home their advantage at the pinnacle of the Chinese market, a campaign for which they have proven themselves remarkably adept. The announcement that they would celebrate the joint venture with CITIC by adorning all bottles of a 2008 vintage with the Chinese character for the auspicious number eight turned out to be a stroke of marketing genius — within 48 hours of the news the case price of Lafite on the Liv-Ex fine wine exchange had jumped 17 percent.
Commenting on the Sotheby’s sale, the baron declared himself "delighted" by the outcome, which "brought Lafite to so many true connoisseurs and wine lovers." Sutcliffe was more succinct: Wine history was made today," she said.
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