My cellar does not hold a Chateau Pétrus but for one minute 18 November, before a 1982 magnum of the stuff was auctioned off at Christie’s in Geneva for CHF10,350, I tried to imagine it in my cellar. It added a bit of slightly jaded but elegant touch of age to the place, with the wine’s memories of the world before the great financial crisis, vintage 2008.
For another minute I wondered what it would take to turn me from someone who loves to drink good wine to someone who collects fine wines. I had just finished reading a novel that should have answered the question, but it didn’t.
If you haven’t yet read The Irresistable Inheritance of Wilberforce by Paul Torday, author of Salmon Fishing, it’s an excellent book and will teach you things you probably didn’t know about collecting wine, as well as about the human heart.
The people who could shed some light on the wine collecting urge are part of the group that spent CHF1.189 million for several wines at the Christie’s auction. A private collector bought the magnum, along with this cheering Christie’s description, balm in these dreary financial times, “This was a dazzling showing for this 1982, which has performed irregularly since birth. Although abundant tannin remains, the wine is sweet, smoky, and ideal for drinking now and over the next 20-25 years.”
I am actually more envious of the buyer who walked off with eight bottles of the 1970 vintage, whose description by Christie’s wine expert David Elswood sounds like a hommage to the kind of person we all want to be at age 38: “The 1970 Petrus has developed magnificently over the last 4-5 years. Tight and reserved early in life, it has blossomed into a true blockbuster. This massive, highly-extracted, full-bodied, jammy, thick, unctuously-textured wine possesses a huge, spice, tobacco, black-cherry, mocha-scented nose. It is a real turn-on. The wine is fully mature, but it has at least 20 years of life remaining.”
Price paid, CHF10,925, which makes it about CHF1 a drop, if there are 195 drops in a glass. It sounds like they should drink it before it leaps out of the glass at them.
And then there was the Château Mouton-Rothschild lot of 66 bottles, one for every year from 1940 to 2005. CHF86,250. But to me the most interesting thing about this was 1978, the only year where there were two bottles. What happened in 1978? Was the wine less appealing, was there a death in the family or was the extra bottle part of a celebratory spending spree?
The itch to collect is starting, but maybe it’s the stories behind the wines that some of us long for.