Melanie Drane spoke with Paul Bowker following the Christie's Fine Wines Auction in Tokyo, October 1997, to obtain his assessment of the Asian wine boom. The Tokyo auction was lively, with a crowd almost four times the size originally anticipated, but the same week, news of the Asian currency and stock market crises dominated the front pages of newspapers. Mr. Bowker has since left his Christie's post.
Paul Bowker: We've been doing this auction for eight years now, so it's really quite routine. I got off the plane on Saturday at nine o' clock and went straight to the warehouse and worked all day. And then had the auction on Monday. I need very little sleep; I average four or five hours a night.
We had 150 seats out initially, and suddenly realized we were completely overwhelmed by the number of people there, so we put out another 30 seats. We had 350 people registered as bidding. Quite a lot of those had people with them as well. The girls tell me that they think close to 400 people were there. It was totally unexpected. In the past, the number of people attending has been reasonably consistant, at about 150-200. Obviously, I'm delighted; there's nothing nicer for an auctioneer than a crowded room. Even if not all of them are going to bid, you automatically feel a little more confident that you might otherwise.
MD: Please describe for me the evolution that you have observed in the eight years that you have been doing the auction, in terms of what is being bought, the prices paid, the type of buyer you're seeing, and to what extent prices have met or exceeded the index average?
PB: Evolution of wines has been quite interesting. If you go back to when we started in 1989, I think we were slightly falling into the trap that an awful lot of people certainly in England did-- which was to think that the Japanese would buy top, high-value lots, and it didn't matter too much about the vintage, as long as it had the right name.
In retrospect, I think we slightly fell into that trap. If you go back to the 1989 or 1990 catalogues, there were an awful lot of Romanée-Conti and Pétrus, Yquem, collections of Romanée-Contee. I remember trying to sell a collection of Romanee-Conti from '52 to '80 or something like that, for ¥5 million. I think that probably that was historically not a very clever start. The sales have always gone well, right from the start-- the buyers have always been there. But since then, I think we have made a conscious effort to bring the level down. Wherever we've had sales, we've had to be very aware of the market conditions, and one of the things we saw, quite early on in our sales, was that taxes and duty on wine in Japan came down sigificantly. So prices in the department stores were dropping a lot.
We made a conscious decision that we wanted to bring the price levels down to maybe second-growth quality, rather than always first-growth. If you look at yesterday's catalogue, there was an awful lot of wine in there between ¥50 and ¥150,000, and I think that's a very sensible range at which to be offering wines.
In terms of buyers, I think there's been an interesting evolution as well. Sales used to be dominated by a very small number of powerful buyers. They just kept their paddle in the air for the whole sale. Yesterday, there were a very large number of buyers. There were a few big buyers, but overall, it wasn't dominated by a small number of buyers. I also noticed how much younger buyers were in the room. There's no doubt about it at all that the average age of buyers over the last eight years has come down significantly.
There was also something I'd been told about, and therefore was not surprised by, but did notice-there were also a large number of ladies buying, and quite a few there in groups. They were sitting there in groups, maybe twos or threes, talking about it together, and they were buying some very good, expensive wines. Those are probably the trends which leap to mind.
MD: I wonder if you might veer from the topic of the Tokyo auction for a moment, and give me your assessment of the dramatic, multiple-record breaking Christie's sale which you led in London on 18-19 September 1997?
PB: It's topical anyway, because by value, 40% of the sale is coming out to this part of the world. First: the fact that it went so well was an enormous relief, because it was a vast amount of wine to put on the market. It was a very important sale. I also happen to know the owner quite well, and therfore had a personal interest in it going well.
But I always thought it would go well, because I genuinely thought it was the greatest cellar which we have ever seen. Obviously, in my job, you see a lot of great cellars, yet I had never seen a cellar like this one. Anyone can make a great cellar-if you've got a lot of money, you can go out and buy as much Pétrus and first-growths as you want, and you can make a great cellar. But what this man has is these case quantities of '28s, '29s, '45s, '59s, and '61s, as well as huge quantities of '82s, '89s, and '90s. He's an interesting character. he was the ultimate reluctant vendor. He didn't want to sell at all. He was ringing me up as close to three weeks before the sale, saying, "Look, I really don't want to sell this wine."
As you know, he's kept roughly the same amount again. So he's still got most of the wines in the catalogue. We sold 36 bottles of Mouton '45, and he's still got another 100. He's not someone who's giving up his wine easily, and he's still keeping cases to drink.
In terms of the actual sale, I was totally overwhelmed. I always thought it would go well, but I never in a million years thought it would go as well as it did. It deserved to. An awful lot of the wines which made high prices were unique. I mean, things like the jerobaums of Gruaud-Larose '37, '45, '49, '55. Those were the thing which the seller was really reluctant to let go of, because obviously, he only had one, and he now doesn't have any.
The crowd we had in the room! People flying over from Hong Kong, Singapore, America, to come and bid-- people saying they wanted to be on the telephone for the entire sale. The early indications before the sale started were very good, and sure enough, when I actually got up on the rostum, it just took off. One of the nice things about it was that we deliberately kept the identity of the vendor a secret, and amazingly, we have still managed to do so after the sale, because we had some very tenacious reporters looking into it.
So the nice thing about it is that we weren't hyping it, we weren't trying to make it a celebrity sale, we weren't putting the man's name to it. And the result of that was that the wines which made the really exceptional prices were the wines which were unique. The younger wines, things like the large quantities of '82s, '89s, and '90s, made high prices in relation to previous auction prices, but they were not ridiculous.
It was things like the imperial of Cheval Blanc '47, jerobaum of Mouton '45, which people paid three times the estimate for. Because you cannot go out and buy that anywhere else. And that, to me, is the correct result, to have the great rarities making-- they're not commodities, they're like a picture, if you want it, you've got to pay for it. Wines like '82 Latour, if you see people paying £5,000 a case for it, you know there's something wrong, because it's not worth that. You can go out into the market in London-- and you can probably go out in Tokyo-- and buy it for less than that. So I think the end result was certainly-- given that we were anticipating between £4-5 million for the sale before the event-- to achieve over £7 million was more than we could have hoped for.
MD: It must have been a tremendously gratifying landmark.
PB: It was very gratifying. It was extremely pleasing.
MD: Could you tell me from your observations and vantage point, how the auction atmosphere and bidder behavior in Tokyo compares to a UK or US wine auction?
PB: First of all, because Christie's have no other auctions in Japan, and we have only one wine auction a year, is that people are at best relatively inexperienced, and at worst, they've never been to an auction before. So it certainly goes slower than we do in London. To put figures on it, in London, we would typically sell 200 lots an hour, and yesterday, I think I just managed 70. But having said that, we're well aware that auction is a relatively new form of sale in Japan. Obviously, you have the fish market, but for the general public, it's a relatively new way of buying. The great thing in Japan is that you always get enormous enthusiasm. People wanted to come, they wanted to have fun, and they wanted to buy.
My impression was, from talking to people, that they're mainy private buyers. They're mainly people who are going to go away and drink the wine, which I personally always like. I'd rather it was going to them, than just to dealers who are going to pass it on at a profit. Generally speaking, they're less professional-I'm not being rude, but they're less experienced. But whatever they lack in experience, they make up for in enthuasiasm.
MD: The process of interpretation slows it down quite a bit as well.
PB: I was aware that it's quite difficult to ensure that she and I are not talking at the same time. As an auctioneer, you tend to get carried away; you get into the flow of it. You're sometimes in the position where even if someone has got a paddle in the air, you have to resist going onto the next bid while she's still repeating the last bid. But you have to do it; not to have an interpreter would be disastrous.
I'll tell you the key difference actually-- which is great-- is that in London, because our sales are so regular, and they're held during the day, and it's a totally global market, an international one. Whereas here, it's very much Japan-based. What we don't get in London is that size of crowd. Yesterday, for example, we had commissioned bids from 80 people and we had 300 or 400 people in the room. Typically in London, we would have 300 or 400 commissioned bids, and 80 people in the room. Because in London, the bids that we're receiving are from Japan, from HK, from Singapore, from Taiwan, from America, all over Europe, and people in London who can't possibly come to our auctions every two weeks.
So it's much more fun as an auctioneer to take a sale out here than one in London, much more fun, with the possible exception of a sale like the September auction.
MD: You certainly get the feeling that it's such an event here; I think many people come just to enjoy the proceedings.
PB: The level of interest and demand out here now is easily sufficient to justify us having an auction more than once a year. I think we should be having two or three sales a year.
MD: Is that in the works?
PB: It could well be. I'm not necessarily saying next year, but in the short-to-medium term. And that would get rid of one of the problems which we have almost every year, which is that certainly over the last five years we've been a very strong market with prices rising fairly steadily. The problem is that when you have a sale every two weeks, people are watching the prices going up very, very slowly over the course of the year. What happens here is that people are getting a catalogue from October 1996 and then one from October 1997. Quite often, there will be the same wines in both catalogues, and they can compare the estimates. Last year, it may be ¥50-70,000 per case, and this year, it's suddenly ¥100-150,000. So people ring me up and say, "What on earth are you doing? Why are you raising prices so much?" And we say, "We're not raising prices, our job is just to give estimates. Unfortunately, the market has risen by 50%." When you attend the auction here just once a year, people are getting an extreme view, whereas in London, you're getting the line in between, here, you're just getting two points.
MD: Many observers have pointed out that wine is a discretionary product that is sensitive to economic flux. This region has recently been in the throes of a currency and stock market crisis which has filled the front page of the Herald Tribune all week. If Asian buying power and appetite for wine were to wither in the face of continuing currency volatility, what ramifications would you expect for the global bull wine market?
PB: Not nearly as significant as you might think. I wouldn't deny for aminute that the Asian wine market has become extremely powerful and extremly significant. And there's no doubt at all that without the extremely enthusiastic bidding of one or two people in this region, in that sale, it could have made 10, 20, 30% less as a total.
Having said that, I think that the wine market is extremely strong, even without the Asian market. The reason is that the Asian areas-whether it's Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, or Japan, are tending to be the people who will just go that one last bid, and obviously, they have the resources. And the wine markets in those countries are less developed, so the wines are less available and they can and thy need to pay a little more.
But what we're certainly seeing is that there are underbidders for all these wines from America, from Canada, from Europe, from Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, England. There's an awful lot of money being made in the City of London at the moment. There's an awful lot of very young dealers and traders in the City who are very interested in buying wine. So for all of these wines, you've got the underlying demand from all these regions other than the Asia Pacific region. And so I really do think that if tomorrow they dropped out completely, there may be a short term dip which would probably be as much to do with confidence as anything else. But in terms of the underlying level of demand, I don't think there would be a massive drop, which I am very relieved about. I would hate to be in the position where you're completely reliant on one area.
But I think you've got to remember that the wine market actually very strong. It's really been strong since 1975. There have been blips in the curve, but we haven't had the wine market equivalent of the '87 stock market crash. We've had basically an upward line with a couple of downward trends in it. Maybe '83, '84, it went down a little bit; '87, '88, it went down a bit, and '91, it went down a little bit. But overall the trend since twenty years ago, which is when the last crash was, has been upward. And the Asian markets have only been in the last centimeter of the graph.
1985-86, for example, the market was incredibly strong. It was as strong as it is now, and that was because the Americans were buying. The Americans are very powerful buyers and they always will be. You've got to remember that the number people who are active if you take the auction market as a micocosm-is still tiny, absolutely tiny. You keep reading about the number of multimillionaires in America. Obvously not all multimillionaires are necessarily interested in wine, but most of the entertain, most of them have dinners, and therefore, most of them want to buy wine. You've got a tiny proportion buying.
Asia hasn't begun yet. You read all about Asia. But the number of seriously active Asian buyers-- representing the 40% of the London sale that is coming over to Asia-- is limited to about 20 buyers. It's nothing. In Taiwan, we have two major buyers. In HK, we have maybe 30 or 40 active buyers. In Singapore, we maybe have 30 or 40 active buyers, maybe the same in Japan. The great thing about the Asian markets is that rather than speculating on wine, they're drinking it. Now if you have a bottle of wine, you drink it with friends. You therefore get this expanding level of interest. As people who've been drinking wines with their friends begin buying wine, they start buying wine and drink it with their friends. So you get this pyramid effect, which I just don't think has started yet. And I think the number of people who are already affecting the market is infinitesimal in relation to what could happen.
You've still got the unknown factor of mainland China. I don't know about fine wine, but they've certainly started importing enormous quantities of lower-level table wine from Bordeaux. I think it's inevitable that a proportion-- and with the scale of China, it doesn't matter how big that proportion is-- will start drinking wine. If people in HK or Singapore have developed this interest, if they do it, then why shouldn't the mainland Chinese?
MD: Your past few comments touch upon my next question already, which is: I wonder if you could offer some observations on the wine-buying behavior around this region. I think perhaps one could say Japan, HK, and maybe Singapore were in the first wave of wine buyers in the 'eighties, and now, there's more activity from, say, Thailand, South Korea, Taiwan and as you say, incipient in China. Which of these markets do you find most remarkable or exciting at the moment?
PB: China at the moment is speculation, so I think I'd really have to say Taiwan. I've been amazed by the demand that we've encountered from Taiwan, even though it's from a relatively small number of buyers. I said that we only had two active buyers; I was underdoing it. It's actually probably ten who are buying regularly. It is phenomenal, the scale on which they are buying. In terms of other countries, it's actually been low-key. We did have a few buyers from Thailand, but of course, they now have the devaluation of the baht and general economic problems. I think that's certainly going to have an effect short-term. I don't think they're going to be significant buyers over the coming years. Indonesia, Malaysia-- not much activity as yet.
I'd certainly agree, Japan, HK, I would put as the first wave. I'd say Singapore followed after HK. Most recently, Singapore and Taiwan have been our most active areas this year, and I'd say China is the one to watch. But I don't think necssaerily all the Asian countries are going to develop into majhor wine buyers. Quite exciting if they do. But I think it depends on the culture. HK, Singapore, there's already an infrastructure of wine trade, restaurants, wine bars, shops, wine lovers. This takes a while to build up. Singapore has the wonderful restaurant-cum-wine shop which has been buying wine for a long time.
MD: Les Amis?
PB: Les Amis, exactly. And you know it's the most wonderful place to go, because you go there and people are drinking great wines. I find Singaopre, HK and Japan the most refreshing places in the world, simply because people are actually sitting there drinking great wine. In England, everyone is talking about wine, but you don't see that many bottles of Lafite, Latour, and Pétrus on the table. Out here, you do.
MD: I find Japan at the moment an exciting place to be in terms of the evolution in the kind of people who are consuming wine and the way they're drinking it. Because I think they're moving from the first stage of wine as a corporate gift, as a prestige item, only in French restaurants, tothe second stage, to some extent, to feeling more comfortable with wine as an everyday beverage with dinner. I think it's an encouraging sign. My column readers are asking for affordable, daily wines.
PB: Something people are becoming more open-minded about-- thank goodness-- is the combination of wine and Asian foods. There are still an awful lot of people in the English wine trade who are a bit sniffy about drinking wine with Chinese food or Japanese food. But I think it's brilliant! I went to a dinner last year-- we did a dinner and a charity auction in Singapore last October-- and we had seven courses of Asian food, with classic French wines, and it was the most wonderful combination, absolutely wonderful.
I think that for people to accept and understand that is a big step in the battle.
MD: I agree. We've combined some Californian Zinfandels, for example, with some Japanese country cuisine which is heartier and has sort of rustic, more smokey flavors than you'd get in a kaiseki restaurant in Tokyo. And some happy pairings emerged.
I wonder, how do you assess Asia's potential as an auction market? Do you think the emphasis will remain here in Tokyo, perhaps more auctions per year?
PB: Well, I think certainly there's the possibility of more auctions per year in Tokyo. We did a sale in Singapore last October; we were due to repeat it again this year. Unfortunately, couldn't, simply because of this monster [points to catalogue of September 18-19 auction in London]. Simply ran out of time.
To be honest, the place I would love to start having auction is HK. Rightly or wrongly, the reason I chose Singapore for a sale last year rather than HK was because the import taxes in HK are so ridiculously high. Probably the way forward in the short term, while taxes remain at 60% in HK, is to proceed with the sale there, but to do it the way we did in Singapore, which is leaving the majority of the wine in the UK, and ship it out post-sale. Then if people don't want to actually import it to HK, they don't have to pay the duties. They can keep it in England, or they can ship it to Singapore, or Macau, which obviously a lot of people are doing right now.
I'd love to resume sales in Singapore; I'd like to start sales in HK, and I'd like to do two a year here. To be honest, the interest and demand out here is easily sufficient to start considering having a permanent member of staff out here to actually organize it. Because at the moment, we are pitifully constrained by demands on our time. In my office we're doing 22 sales a year. We have another office in London which is doing 12-13 sale a year. From my office, we organize two sales a year in Geneva, two sales a year in Amsterdam. We help out our NY department, who organize 5 sales a year. We're doing one out here, one in France. We just cannot cope with the volume. In addition to all this, we're being asked to do tastings and tutored tastings and lectures and everything else. So at the moment, the reason we haven't been able to expand more into the Asian market is through, simply, lack of resources. We need to seriously consider having someone out here.
MD: Within what sort of time span do you think that might be realized?
PB: Probably during the course of next year. Either based here or in London, but concentrating solely on this market, this area.
MD: I suspect from your comments so far that you are not of the school of thought that would chalk up the current wine boom to a milennium frenzy. Given the relative scarcity of fine wines and the increasing number of wine markets around the world, do you think it's inevitable that as more and more savvy wine consumers emerge from places like this region, competing for the creme de la creme of the wine market, that prices are going to escalate unceasingly?
PB: Not unceasingly. There are glass ceilings in the wine market. A good example is the 1982 which have gone up really without any slowing down for the past 10 years. There's no doubt at all in my mind that they've reached their peak, certainly in the short term. You've got the '82 first growths selling for betwee £300-400 a bottle and I don't see that going up inexorably. It's got to slow down. Possibly some of the more expensive 1990s are going to slow down. You get up to £2,000, 3,000, 4000 a case-I don't think you'll necessarily get up to £6000, 7000, 8000 a case. I think overall, however,over the next ten years, prices are going to continue to at least be firm and at best go up significantly.
The reasons are simple. You have limited production. In these very top niche wines, primarily the first and super-second Bordeaux, you have a limited production which if anything is going down. Say Lafite which is 20,000 cases a year. You've got increased selection from the vineyards so more and more of them are producing second wines, substantial quantities of second wines. You've got Les Four de Latour, Terroir de Lafite...which means that the actual quantity of the first wine, Lafite and Latour, is very little, is shrinking and you've got what I see as an increase in demand.
I don't see any reason for the demand to fall off. I think it will increase in Europe, in England, in America, and it's going to continue increasing in this region. But I think there have to be some constraints on prices. They just can't go up and up and up. The other thing that I feel, which funnily enough is a passionately held view of the guy who owns this collection [London auction on 18-19 September], is that he really...he was very laissez faire about the whole thing; he let me set the estimates, let me decide on the wines we were putting in. But the comment that he kept coming up with repeatedly was: if my 1990 Latour is worth this, my 1945 Latour should be worth this. And I think he's absolutely right.
We've got to station our young wines. Obviously, there are two ways of looking at this. Either young wines have gotten too expensive or old wines have gotten too cheap. There's no doubt that to drink '45s now, or '47s, '49s, '53s or '59s is a great experience. Wines of this quality do develop beautifully over 30, 40, 50 years. And to put it in simple perspective, for the same price now, you could go out into the market and buy a case of 1990 Latour, or a case of 1970 Latour, or a case of 1966 Latour. And I know which one I'd buy. But an awful lot of people are buying the 1990 and not the 1970. I think maybe people will start to re-assess this and go back and look at some of the older vintages. But then, of course, you've got even more of a supply problem.
MD: I was very suprised to see the 1974 Heitz Martha's Vineyard selling for ¥90,000 yesterday. I heard someone asking you about the future potential for premier Californian wines. I wonder if that is something you would consider introducing more of in future auctions, for example, in Tokyo.
PB: Tokyo, I must admit, I hadn't thought about that. They're certainly appearing more and more, both at our London auctions and most particularly in NY. It's quite interesting, our NY wine department had a sale the day after our September 18-19 auction, and the one thing which came out above anything else on their press release the day after the sale was the incredible strength of demand for Californian wines, for the top wineries. I think now they are beginning to look beyond Dominus and Opus One and Marha's Vineyard. People are realizing there are other premier wineries nd they're paying some hefty prices for them. I think this is going to be a feature; I think the Bordeaux market's narrowness (if you take the total of our sales all year, you're looking at 80% Bordeaux), that's got to diminish. Partly because we're going to find it hard to find the supply to keep going at that level and partly because if we're going to expand, the natural expansion has got to be into non-Bordeaux wines, California, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, perhaps, Italy, Spain, and I think alll of these wines are going to start finding a place in auction.
Also, one of the factors of prices getting up to levels that certainly I find difficult to afford now for the wines I love, people inevitably start turning to other wines for drinking on a more daily basis. You may be heading toward a time when you drink your classed-growth Bordeaux for good dinner parties, and you drink Italian, Spanish, or Californian wines on a more regular basis.
MD: There does seem to be an increasing consistency of quality in some New World regions which makes those wines attractive for those of us who can't possibly keep up with the bidding at auctions like yesterday.
PB: Absolutely. Also, one thing that's happening-- Australia's a good example, of where you've got too wide a gap between the one wine we do sell at auction which is Grange (now making £3000 a case at auction for the youngest vintage), and then you go down to the next one which maybe is getting 10% of that. There's just too wide a gap. I'm sure that's got to level out. Either Grange is going to come down, or they're going to meet in the middle, and you're going to have a similar situation in America. There's nothing in America that I'm aware of selling at the price level of Grange. But you've got your Opus Ones and Dominus, selling at £50 a bottle or so. And there's a wide margin between that and the next wine. Probably less of a margin, quite a lot of wines at £30, 40 a bottle. I'm sure we're due for an expansion.
In 1984 or '85, the year I joined Christie's, we had a sale of New World wines. It was rather condescending. The catalogue actually said, "New World Wines." Probably we were just ten years too early; it didn't go particularly well. If we did that sale now, it would probably go extremely well. Maybe it's something we ought to be doing.
MD: [.....] I'm very curious to hear how you ended up in this field.
PB: I always had my heart set on a career in finance, either as a stock broker or as a banker. I always thought I'd go and live in Saudi Arabia and earn a lot of money. I was doing economic at school and I had a place to go and rread economics at university. In the interim, between the two, I ended up in Paris and went to go and work for Stephen Spurrier who at the time has the most wonderful wine shop called Les Caves de Madeleine. And he also had the Academie du Vin in Paris. Initially I went to work for him for a very short period of time and loved it and ended up staying for the better part of the year. I did courses in the Academic du Vin.
At the time, Spurrier was Christie's agent in France which meant that if Christie's found a wonderful old cellar in Bordeaux or Burgundy or wherever, Stephen would arrange for people to go down, pack up the cellar and have it shipped to London. So I did quite a lot of that while I was there. I got involved with checking old wines, packing old wines, and seeing cellars, met Michael Broadbent while I was there. And then I duly forgot about it and went off and did my degree in economics. When I came to the end of it, I realized that I was more interested in wine than I was in finance.
I was very lucky, I approached Christie's at just the right time; it was very much a question of right place at the right time and went in as a very junior junior in 1984 and sort of crawled my way up the ranks until now. It's been a fascinating job. Obviously I've learnt. Doing the sort of job I do is not somethign that you can learn. You can go out and do wine courses and learn about wine, but ultimately, doing what we do is something you can only possibly learn by doing it, learning how to value wines. I'm very fortunate; obviously we get to taste a lot of wines, although I have to admit that what we taste tends to be rather narrow within the context of our work. We tend to taste Bordeaux, Bordeaux, and Bordeaux. A little bit of Burgundy every now and then. But I've always made a great effort to get out and go to trade tastings, go to lectures, and so on. But it's been fascinating.
MD: It's certainly an adrenalin-charged career.
PB: Then of course there's the auctioneering side which is also great fun. Nowadays, Christie's is much more rigorous about who they let take auctions and how they do it. In order to be approved, you now have to go through a series of tests and training, tests and training...When I started in 1986, as an auctioneer, I was given two days notice and I was just told by Michael Broadbent, "Oh, by the way, you're taking the sale on Thursday." Having never done it before. And it the most terrifying thing, when you first do it. Everyone thinks that the role of an auctioneer is just to sit up there and spot who's bidding. But in fact, it's rather more complicated than that, because you have bids which are written in the book, written in code, and when you have commisioned bids, it's all written in code as well...our London catalogues have bids the whole way down, on every single lot, there'll be at least two bids.
So your role as an auctioneer is actually to exercise the commissioned bids before you even start looking at the room. So even though you can see people waving paddles around, you can pretend to look at them, but in fact you're looking after these people first, because there's no point in letting people in the room come in until you've cleared the commissioned bids. So I was very much thrown into the deep end on that. And then, in terms of the Asian side, I started coming out here in 1989.
MD: Was there any lot yesterday which surprised you or struck you as particularly remarkable?
PB: There were some interesting trends. I was certainly intrigued by some of the extremely active bidding for things I'd didn't expect active bidding for. I'm thinking particularly of the mixed lots of Lafite, Latour, Moutin '72, three bottles, estimated-- I thought quite reasonably, at ¥60-80,000. Sold for ¥220,00, which to me, there is very little logic for. That works out to about £300 a bottle, and in London, those would sell for about £300 a case, each of those. So I was quite surprised by those.
I was intrigued, though not particularly surprised, by the fact that amongst the lots which didn't sell were three of the best. Now this is what I was saying about the '82s. We had the Lafite '82, with an estimate of £780-900,000 which is bang-on the London market price. Likewise the Mouton '82 with ¥900,000-- it is on-the-market price. And those were unsold. There's a very good lesson to be learned here. We couldn't even get a bid of ¥850,000, which works out at ¥70,000 a bottle. But the next lot was a single bottle of the same wine, which sold at ¥120,000, which is equivalent to ¥1.4 million a case. So the moral of the story is, we take these out and we break them up into single-bottle or small lots.
In Singapore, we had a very similar sale in terms of size and structure. And it went very well. But about halfway through, there was a large chunk of white Burgundy. Absolutely top-quality white Burgundy, Les-Fleves and Sauzenne [sp], and so on. And I was taking the sale, and there was a room full of people, with everyone bidding away on all the red wines, Bordeaux and Burgundy. And then we came to the white Burgundy and evey single hand just came down. I went through the entire patch of white Burgundies without a single bid. They had no interest in white wines, no interest at all. And in fact yesterday, they went very well.
MD: And to what do you attribute that difference in experience?
PB: Our experience has been very much that the Chinese markets just do not want white wine. Whereas there seems to be a better market for it here.
MD: There's the cliche that you can't see white wine well in glasses on the table across a restaurant, and people want to be seen drinking wine.
PB: It could be water! You never know quite what to believe. You hear that red is a very lucky color for the Chinese and therefore people like to drink red wines, but I'm sure there must be slightly more to it than that. Certainly, clients and friends I know in Hong Kong and Singapore only drink red wine. The English are great traditionalists, and you always order a bottle of white with your starter, and a bottle of red with your main course. The Chinese just tend to order red wine right the way through.
MD: Mr. Bowker, thank you very much for your time today.
(c) Copyright Melanie Campbell Drane, 1997