Drink Now — Or Hold Your Peace

By PETER HELLMAN, Special to the Sun
May 23, 2007

Auction records were decisively shattered last week at Sotheby's and Christie's. Front page stories reported the sales of a $73 million Rothko, a $72 million Warhol, and a $53 million Bacon. All three paintings far exceeded their estimates, as well as previous records for the artists.

But did you also know about the three lots of Chateau Petrus 1982 that were quietly hammered down last Saturday at Sotheby's for $72,000 a case plus sales tax? That was also a record high for a 25-year-old wine from a small vineyard on the Pomerol plain in Bordeaux — and for the sale itself, which fetched $5,162,000, almost double the high estimate. On Monday at Christie's in London, a case of 1947 cheval blanc sold for $148,000, a sale that beat the European auction record for claret.

Those prices are as astonishing, on their own terms, as the runaway prices of trophy art. Not in absolute dollars, of course, but think about it: A painting that is sold for tens of millions of dollars will last for centuries. Even if its buyer removes it from public view, the work isn't really gone. It will probably return to the auction room one day, to be seen and enjoyed afresh. The pleasure of a bottle of wine, on the other hand, is only in the drinking. The span of that pleasure will last less than an hour, perhaps much less, from the time it's uncorked until only the dregs remain.

At about $6,500 a bottle (including tax), or $800 a glass, Petrus 1982 uncorked is an ephemeral luxury. But, in the current heady wine market, it's hardly the most expensive. At Saturday's sale, two bottles of Romanée-Conti 1990, from a tiny plot of Burgundy, sold for $22,750, or more than $11,000 a bottle. Even that price seems cheap compared to the dearest wine on the auction circuit: Chateau Mouton Rothschild 1945.

Last fall, a single case of six magnums (double bottles) of the wine sold for $345,000. That's for a wine made when Bordeaux, in the aftermath of war and occupation, was flat on its back.

For the owners of big ticket wines, opening bottles now becomes less a simple pleasure than a high-stakes financial calculation. As an auction writer for Wine Spectator, Peter Meltzer, said after the Sotheby's auction, "You have to ask yourself who at your table do you really want to open such wines for." Some collectors, of course, will be free with a corkscrew, and live large while they can. Others will keep their wines sealed in unopened cases in cold storage, like so many coffins, until they are consigned again to auction — and so the dearest wines begin to be treated more like gold ingots than liquid pleasure.

The upside of the trophy wine scramble is that excellent wines with humbler labels are often neglected. At the Sotheby's sale, for example, a case of Chateau du Tertre 1982, a fine and long-lived Margaux, sold for $388 — just more than $32 a bottle for a wine in its prime. Another comparative bargain was a lot of 24 bottles of Pavillon Rouge du Chateau Margaux that sold for $896. True, Pavillon is the "second" wine of a great First Growth. But lots of properties could wish that their "first" wine had the class of Pavillon Rouge in the splendid 1996 vintage. At $37 a bottle, it costs pocket change compared to Chateau Margaux 1996, now selling for just more than $500 a bottle.

Twenty-eight years ago, the most expensive wine I had ever purchased was a single bottle of Musigny 1961, a red burgundy made by the Compte de Vogüé. Priced at $60, it was a major investment, and I cradled it like a baby in my lap on the flight home from Paris. But on what august occasion would it be served? Around a year later, when I was newly married, my wife baked a favorite dish for my birthday, the southern French codfish purée called brandade. I was thinking about drinking a modest Sancerre with it. Then I heard a crash in the kitchen. Dashing in, I found the brandade splattered over the floor and Susan in tears.

"This calls for the best bottle in the house," I said. And so, with what remained of dinner — salad, cheese, and a baguette — we drank the deep and voluptuous Musigny. I wish, for the purchasers of the $6,500 Petrus and the $11,000 Romanée-Conti, memories as rich and long-lasting as mine.

Drink Now — Or Hold Your Peace

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