Who’s buying wine?
The great joy of our quarterly wine auctions is the extraordinarily broad range of fine and rare wines that you would never find at retail.
While many of our bidders are experienced wine collectors and investors or trade buyers topping up their inventory. Increasingly, we are seeing new wine buyers who have discovered this attractively simple and transparent way to taste rare wines.
Wine is all about provenance.
All our wines have the potential to be a great buy for a lucky winner, however it’s also true to say that there is nothing ever guaranteed and the real quality control comes only on opening a bottle to taste it. Where we are certain of the provenance we will mention it in the listing, as we do for Lord Evgeny Lebedev’s wines for instance. On the other hand, there’s fun (or frustration) to be had by taking a punt on an ancient bottle of wine from the 1960s (in truth our wine team reject as many wines as they accept to the auction: our aim is to only ever list wines that are in good condition).
The trick is to know a little about what you’re bidding on.
With this in mind we have published tips on these pages for wine buyers and wine sellers, as well as quick tips on buying Port, Champagne and a growing library of 5-minute reads that will fire up your love of wines you might never have previously considered within your reach.
So, getting back to the results of our July 2021 Wine Auction:
Well for every headline grabbing case of six Chateau Le Pin that we sold for £6,600, canny buyers picked up bargain cases of six Condrieu Le Berne for closer to £100. We also saw plenty of buyers stocking up their wine racks with affordable mature fine wine and mature Port for under £100. My tip is leave these wines to settle for a few weeks ready to pair up with your next big meal in. Then, do let us know how they tasted.
