I didn’t bother registering to bid. I knew that the prices in yesterday’s Christie’s wine auction in Hong Kong would be astronomical. I couldn’t afford even a few drops of wines from the bottles of the Burgundy myth Henri Jayer that were on the auction block.
About two and a half hours later, the 98 lots of dozens of bottles and magnums from the private cellar of Henri Jayer sold for more than HK$66 million, or about US$8.5 million. Most of the lots were three times their reserve price. The highest price paid was for a case of 1985 Henri Jayer Vosne-Romanée Cros Parantoux for just over HK$2 million, or about $266,555. This was followed by a case of 1979 Richebourg for HK$1.8 million, or about US$235,000, and six magnums of 1999 Henri Jayer Vosne-Romanée Cros Parantoux for HK$1.3 million, or about US$172,000. Prices included the 21 percent buyer’s premium.
The majority of the wines went to one buyer. A woman in her late 20s timidly sat at the front table of the event that started at about 7:30 pm, and bid on every lot. She had three other women friends at her table. She seldom looked up from her auction catalog, even when holding up her bidding number. She apparently was the girlfriend of a well-known Hong Kong land developer tycoon.
A couple of my friends also were big bidders in the event. They are some of the top Jayer drinkers on earth. I have been to dinners when they taste six or eight different vintages and appellations a sitting. They love the depth of fruit, purity, and precision to the wines. They also love the rarity.
That’s what made the auction so unique. These bottles were the last of the personal cellar of the late winemaker. Part of the cellar was sold privately a few years back to a syndicate of Hong Kong wine collectors. It’s this provenance that makes keen Asian wine collectors pay so far above the odds for super rare wines.
“Provenance is more and more an issue,” said Simon Tam, Christie’s head of wine for China. “People want the best quality of wine from the best source.”
No one could refute this in yesterday’s sale. The bottles even came in special wooden cases. (Jayer wines were always sold in carton boxes.) Some had been re-labeled, but all had their original corks.
I was wondering what the later great wine grower and winemaker Henri Jayer would say about the incredibly high prices and all the excitement over his last bottles in an auction on the 22nd floor of a skyscraper in Central Hong Kong. I met the man a couple of times in the late 1980s when I was covering Burgundy and other European wines for the US wine magazine The Wine Spectator. He was really a man of the earth and few words – the antithesis of a big vibrant city like Hong Kong.
“I think Henri would not have been surprised,” said James Finkel, a New York wine collector who translated into English a French book about Jayer a few years ago. He was at the auction and bought one lot of wines. “By the end of his life, he was already aware how much money people were paying for his wines.”
Still, it’s a long way from the cold, stark vineyards of the village of Vosne-Romanée in France, to the bright lights of Hong Kong.
