Wines & Spirits

RARE pub jugs have a habit of turing up in unusual places. The previously unrecorded Knotty Ash Ales jug, right, made in the latter years of the 19th century for Joseph Jones & Co., had been spotted in a thrift shop in British Columbia earlier this year.

In terms of collecting focus, much of the pre-sale attention for the Harvey’s Wine Museum sale at Bonhams centred on the October 1 glass and ceramics auction.

FOR Harvey's read Bristol Cream, but there is far more to this celebrated brand than the nation’s best known sherry.

It was a poignant irony that the contents of the North Hampshire vineyard that had so impressed Her Majesty should come up for auction in the same month that another offering of Château Mouton-Rothschild was making a less than favourable impression with the British establishment.

Clearly Tony Blair would be best advised to take round a bottle of Wooldings ’94, rather than Mouton ’89 the next time he pops over to the Palace for dinner. As has been widely reported in the media, the Prime Minister recently received half a case of Château Mouton-Rothschild’s 1989 vintage as a 50th birthday present from President Jacques Chirac.

LOOKING back on spring to see what green shoots of recovery might be discernible, a rather unexpected contender for the category turns out to be silver. Obviously, silver starts any recovery from a pretty low and long-standing trough but some of the results round the country certainly indicated that there was more than just auctioneers’ wishful thinking behind the optimistic comments.

THE move towards better prices for silver took Cumbrian auctioneers Penrith Farmers' & Kidd's rather by surprise at their 1125-lot quarterly catalogue sale on March 26 (15% buyer's premium inc. VAT) – although it was a wine-related item which did the honours and these do have their own buoyant market.

The now-defunct firm of Hedges & Butler (est.1667) was one of the oldest wine merchants in England, originally based by the Thames on a site now occupied by Charing Cross Station. The name of the company has now disappeared, but what its own publicity described as “our very interesting collection of old Viniana” provided an eye-catching highlight for Bonhams’ (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) otherwise fairly routine mixed sale of art and antiques in Knowle.

If, as a recent opinion poll has suggested, Sir Winston Churchill was voted the greatest-ever Briton, and Mouton-Rothschild’s 1945 vintage is, as Michael Broadbent described it in his Great Vintage Wine Book, “a Churchill of a wine”, is Mouton-Rothschild ’45, ergo, the Greatest Ever Wine?

With tarriffs and subsidies yet again a hot political topic, it was appropriate that this wine label caused such a stir at Woolley and Wallis’ Salisbury salerooms on July 17.

After 236 years of auctioning wine in London and other international centres, Christie’s will be holding their inaugural sale of fine wines in Paris on September 14.

To prove the point, Christie’s have held their first ever ‘Transatlantic’ wine auction. Dubbed the International Burgundy Sale, this 973-lot auction of the region’s most prestigious wines was offered in two legs, the first 303 lots in an afternoon session at Zachy’s/Christie’s (10% buyer’s premium) in New York on October 30, the remaining 670 the following evening at Christie’s (10% buyer’s premium) King Street on November 1.

Like English haggis and Scotch rarebit, the idea of Welsh Whisky is somewhat dubious. A few years ago a Welsh bottling company began to market a product called Welsh Whisky, which won praise from American connoisseurs but was just Scotch whisky in disguise.The company subsequently ceased trading.

Manufacturing expertise and a fondness for the hard stuff are notable traits among Scottish folk, and they were well married in this miniature copper whisky still, pictured, offered by Glasgow auctioneers McTear’s (10 per cent buyer’s premium) on September 11.

“For the really top things there’s no shortage of buyers, but the middle ground is weaker,” affirmed Stephen Mould of Sotheby’s wine department. “If you’ve got large parcels that depend on the trade, then bidders are more cautious. But if you’ve got small quantities of the finest things there are plenty of private buyers prepared to pay good money.”

Apart from a few isolated surprises for cult rarities, Sotheby’s and Christie’s recent wine sales on both sides of the Atlantic bore out this sense of a market in a state of suspended animation.

Every sector of the auction market has been feeling jittery about the prospect of economic slowdown in the US. Wine sales have already had to re-adjust to more sober trading conditions after the binge of sales that led up to Millennium and auctioneers on both sides of the Atlantic have been understandably nervous about rich clients thinking that $5000 cases of wine have become an unjustifiable luxury.

BACK IN the mid-1990s, when Far Eastern buyers were sending prices through the roof and people were (supposedly) stocking up for their Millennium parties, fine wine was one of the most excitingly volatile of all auction markets.

US: RECENT jitters about the health of the US economy have had a noticeably negative effect on several sectors of the international auction market. The US wine market, however, seems to be relatively untouched as yet.

FINE wine is one of those areas of the auction market which is bound to catch a cold if the world economy sneezes into recession or slowdown over the coming months. Higher than usual unsold rates at recent auctions in London and New York would suggest that buyers are already taking a more selective view of the wine market.