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.
