The Antique Wine Company of London announced last week that it sold 135 bottles of Chateau d’Yquem to a European buyer for £775,000 ($1.5 million). The collection includes every consecutive vintage of Chateau d’Yquem produced between 1860-2003. And as a clever marketing ploy, it also included 9 empty bottles, signed by the director of Yquem, with each label bearing the text “this is to certify that no Chateau d’Yquem was produced in this vintage due to adverse weather conditions.” For the curious, those “bad weather” years were 1992, 1974, 1972, 1964, 1952, 1951, 1930, 1915 and 1910. 
Fierce auction bidding
The collection was sold via an auction, which in this case, was exactly the right way to sell it give the rarity of what had been assembled (apparently, not even the Chateau itself holds all of these vintages). With a total of 26 bidders from Europe, Asia, the U.S., and Russia, the drive to own something this unique almost doubled the bidding in the final 24 hours from £400,000 to £775,000.
Other benefits
From reading the press articles on The Antique Wine Company site, a few other benefits come with the purchase:
- A pair of cabinets custom-made to house the collection by well-known British furniture designer, David Linley. Built using American black walnut, a Decanter.com article referenced these as costing £50,000 each.
- Two-day trip to Bordeaux with the Director of the Antique Wine Company, Stephen Williams, to visit Chateau d’Yquem and receive the royal treatment.
- A degree of personal press coverage and notoriety. The successful bidder is to be announced publicly in January.
- The opportunity to throw a very exclusive party in the future.
A word on the price
A December 2006 Robb Report article (scroll down this page) promoting the collection had a subtitle stating “Price starting at $2.5 million.” Given that the selling price obtained of $1.5 million was billed as “unprecedented” by The Antique Wine Company, just another reminder about doing a little analysis before bidding (see prior post, “Sanity checking” auction lot estimates).
The same Robb Report article made reference to a “smaller” Yquem collection having sold for $1 million in 1996 (also by The Antique Wine Company). I couldn’t find any corroboration of this in a quick Google search but found a 2004 thread on the Mark Squire’s Wine Bulletin Board titled “129 vintages of Yquem is a beautiful sight to see!”. It references a sale by The Antique Wine Company of Yquem covering the period 1868-1997. There’s no mention of this on The Antique Wine Company site (or elsewhere). Perhaps the price achieved was not high enough to be helpful in selling this new collection?
(You may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)