Late last year, at a Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong, an anonymous Chinese phone bidder paid $232,000 each for three bottles of 1869 Château Lafite Rothschild, a Napoleon III — era wine that was already maturing nicely when the Boxer uprising stymied European imperial ambitions in China. That price smashed the previous record of $156,450, paid in 1985 by the Forbes publishing family for a 1787 Lafite bottled for U.S. Founding Father Thomas Jefferson. Gasps were heard in the Hong Kong auction room, but what really shocked the wine cognoscenti was the $70,000 paid at the same auction, not for another rare trophy bottle of Bordeaux but for a case of 2009 Lafite — a wine so young it has yet to be bottled. Prior to the auction, the much hyped 2009 vintage was being priced at around $18,000 a case. So the $70,000 Hong Kong hammer price represented a whopping increase of just under 300%.Not since the winter of 1636 — in the midst of tulip mania in Holland, where for a time bulbs traded for the price of houses — has the price of a perishable product escalated so dramatically. “Overnight,” says Jack Hibberd, research manager at the online fine-wine exchange Liv-ex, “long-term target prices increased to levels people didn’t imagine were possible.” Short term too: thanks to Lafite’s halo effect, wine merchants around the globe are already marking up prices of Lafite’s main Bordeaux rivals, including Latour, Margaux, Mouton Rothschild and Haut-Brion. The index of 100 top wines maintained by Liv-ex rose 40% in 2010.
