Montrose barrel snapped up for over US$100k

A whole barrel of 2016 Château Montrose has been sold at auction in the US for over US$100,000 – double its low estimate.

The barrel was sold by Hart Davis Hart in Chicago as part of a two-day sale dedicated to Bordeaux from 3-4 November.

Introduced by the second growth’s CEO, Hervé Berland, bidding for the barrel began at $50,000 and eventually reached $119,500 making it the third most expensive lot ever sold by HDH. The buyer of the barrel will have the luxury of bottling the wine in whichever format they wish and Berland will host a private tasting at their home as well.

Another rare set of wines on offer at the sale was a 1986 Coffret Cépages Assortment direct from the cellars of Léoville Las Cases, one of only 80 in the world, which sold for $6,572.

The auction made $5.6 million over all, with 1,480 lots of Bordeaux from 47 vintages being offered.

There was competitive bidding for the 223 lots of various wines from the 2000 vintage, which made over $1m in total, while the 196 lots of 2010 wines just pipped the 144 lots being offered from the 2009 vintage, the former making $518,988 to the latter’s $444,719. A sign, nonetheless, that the ‘09s still tend to command a slight premium to their 2010 cousins.

Other top lots from the sale were 12-bottle cases of 1990 Petrus and 1982 Lafite, six bottle cases of 2000 Petrus and 1989 Haut-Brion an imperial of 2005 Petrus and three double-magnums of 1995 Petrus.

The sale of a whole barrel of classed growth claret is not without modern precedent, as a barrel of 2015 Palmer was auctioned in Hong Kong for HK$3m (US$384,000) last year.

In the Scotch whisky collecting world, meanwhile, the trend is rather more entrenched with casks of rare malts making very high sums on the auction circuit, while the owner of one of the largest private cask collections recently hinted they were eventually going to release more.