Watches, art, cars, jewelry, handbags, wine and more — cleaned, USD-normalized, and searchable.
Get Started →
Sotheby’s sold Immortal Vintages: 200 Years of Bordeaux, a single-owner cellar tracing two centuries of the region, for $2.1 million in New York on 17 April. Every one of the 272 lots found a buyer, 92 percent of them above their high estimate, and the sale set ten world records.
Its stars were two magnums of Château Lafite Rothschild 1870 from the cellars of Glamis Castle in Scotland, seat of the Earls of Strathmore, where they had been laid down in 1878 and left undisturbed for nearly a century. Both predate the phylloxera epidemic and were made from original, ungrafted vines. They sold for a combined $306,250, each a world record: the first at $106,250 and the second, still under its original cork, at $200,000 after almost four minutes of bidding.
A single bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild 1865, among the oldest Bordeaux ever offered by Sotheby’s and drawn from the North Wales cellar of Sir George Meyrick, made $40,000, roughly double its high estimate.
Records fell across the leading châteaux, many in the large formats that add rarity and longevity. A 1961 Château Palmer in double magnum reached $62,500 and a 1959 Château Haut-Brion in jeroboam $60,000, part of a run that carried the great vintages of 1945, 1959, 1961 and 1982 alongside a vertical of Château d’ Yquem reaching back to the nineteenth century.
The cellar was assembled over decades by a single collector who traced his passion to a vertical tasting of Château Margaux in the 1980s, and kept it in one custom-built cellar in the Northeast ever since. Deliberately concise for a single-owner sale, it read as a roll call of Bordeaux from the pre-phylloxera nineteenth century, widely regarded as a golden age of winemaking, through to the modern classics.
With fewer than ten nineteenth-century red Bordeaux offered in New York by Sotheby’s in recent decades, the sale was a rare public test of demand for pre-phylloxera wine, and condition, provenance and large formats did the work.
(Press Release)
