Robert de Luxembourg, the head of two of the greatest Bordeaux estates in the world, Chateau Haut-Brion and La Mission Haut-Brion, stopped in Hong Kong for 24 hours to promote a Sotheby’s wine auction directly from his cellars on October 4 in Hong Kong.
“I wanted to use this sale to tell the story of Domaine Clarence Dillon (the holding company of all his Bordeaux properties) to the Asian market,” says Luxembourg, who spoke about the sale and other subjects over a coffee with me at the Upper House.
The sale includes some of the rarest bottles from the cellars of his various Bordeaux wineries including seldom-seen vintages of Haut-Brion such as 1891, 1911, 1916, 1920, 1924, 1931, 1933, 1936 and dozens of others. Some of the special bottles are from 1935, the year his family bought the first-growth property, while one is from the WWII victory vintage of 1945 – one of eight original bottles left in the cellar.
“Many of these wines I have never tasted,” he adds. “This is without doubt the biggest auction of wines from the cellars of Haut-Brion in the last 10 years, and it will probably never happen again.”
The one-day sale includes more than 300 different lots. The wines to be sold are from all the family’s estates including Haut-Brion, La Mission Haut-Brion and Quintus, the St.-Emilion property they bought a few years ago. This is Dillon’s first vintage at Quintus, 2011. The auction also offers impressive bottles of the great white of Haut-Brion and La Mission Haut-Brion (formerly Laville Haut-Brion). Hong Kong is the biggest market in the world for the white of Haut-Brion.
I asked Luxembourg what wine he would like to most drink that was offered in the sale, and it was hard to get a straight answer.
“I haven’t tasted the majority of the wines on offer,” he says with a smile. “The 1891 I haven’t tasted. The 1911 I haven’t tasted. The 1918 I have tasted…”
He was much more decisive when I asked him what was the best lot of the sale. “That would have to be the limited edition cabinet of some of the best vintages of Haut-Brion ever made,” he says. The handcrafted wooden cabinet designed by English royalty Lord Linley includes one bottle of the following vintages: 1935, 1945, 1959, 1961, 1975, 1989, 1990, 2009, 2010 (both red and white.) The proceeds from this lot goes to the charity Médecins Sans Frontières Hong Kong.
Carl Tiedemann -= Tiedemann wines