Petrus tops $5.1 million sale as Sotheby’s starts H.K. marathon

Bottles of 1982 Chateau Petrus fetched $6,500 each as demand from Asian buyers boosted prices at the start of Sotheby’s eight-day Hong Kong auction.

Sellers and collectors spent HK$39.7 million ($5.1 million) on Bordeaux and Burgundy yesterday as they snapped up Haut- Brion, Latour, Margaux and Mouton-Rothschild.

“Prices are up at least 20 percent on the October auction,” said S.K. Yu, a Hong Kong wine collector. “To those on the mainland, even though the final bid price is 30 percent higher than it should be, the item can still be sold for twice as much in China.”

Hong Kong eclipsed the U.S. in 2010 as the No. 1 wine auction market, based on research by the Wine Spectator Magazine. Sales in the former U.K. colony were $165 million, 40 percent of the global total. Hong Kong scrapped wine duties in February 2008, spurring demand.

Yu, who brought with him an iPad and computer to cross- check the market prices of the goods during the auction, spent HK$1.2 million on 15 lots yesterday. “I’m coming again tomorrow and the day after,” said the 41-year-old.

About 11,000 bottles will be sold in almost 1,300 lots on April 2 and 3. Sotheby’s raised $14.6 million in a two-day wine auction in January and HK$410.4 million in 2010, 60 percent of its global total and more than New York and London combined, it said in January.

“There’s an auction fever that is almost contagious,” Jeannie Cho Lee, a Master of Wine, said before the sale. “The buyers are more and more mainland Chinese. Iconic brands seem to sell better because brand is especially important where there is a culture of giving and the importance of face.”

First Sale
The 3,600-lot spring sale is part of Hong Kong’s first major auction of the year and had a presale estimate of HK$2.4 billion, said New York-based Sotheby’s (BID), the world’s biggest publicly traded auction company.

The weekend wine sales are followed by Modern and Contemporary Asian Art, traditional Chinese paintings, antiques, jewelry, watches and ceramics through April 8. The highlights are two private European collections of ceramics and Chinese contemporary art, including an 18th-century Qing vase worth more than $23 million.

Potential buyers who aren’t represented at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre sale can bid via Sotheby’s online bidding system.