Drink - Victoria Moore ventures into the virtual world of wine auctions
My finger hovered over the keyboard, one click away from a case of Chateau Mouton Rothschild 1989. I imagined the bottles, just beginning to accrue a thick blanket of dust. I imagined my bank manager (on such occasions, I am given to conjuring up a mythical bank manager figure scanning through my statements, essentially an expanded document of my bibulousness, with a frown). It would have been very silly of me to have spent hundreds of pounds in a trice on wine I wouldn't have known what to do with, even if I had the money. What struck me, though, was how ferociously simple this business is. And once you've hit the OK button, there's no going back.
Auctioning wine on the internet really kicked off about a year ago. At the time, because not everyone was switched on to it, there were some astonishing bargains to be had. The word now is that online prices tend not to be too good. Sotheby's (whose international wine sales have exceeded $52m in a year) and Christie's (which says it is the world's largest seller of mature wines, with annual auction sales reaching more than $60m) have not yet been tempted to auction wine online, although both say they are constantly reviewing that decision.
"I think online wine auctions are still in their infancy," says a spokesman for Sotheby's. "We preview our live auctions online and we do get some hits, but we haven't noticed the internet affecting the business yet."
But it does open the market to those who are not in the trade and would like to dibble-dabble, but are intimidated by the prospect of visiting one of the grander auction houses. At winebid.com, which holds fortnightly auctions at geographical bases in Australia, America and the UK, a rough check through the list of wines in the UK auction reveals that what's being sold reflects the sort of breakdown that Sotheby's enjoys: 75-85 per cent Bordeaux, a chunk of Burgundy, then vintage port and a few other strays.
There is much talk of Californian cult wines and SuperTuscans fetching vast sums of money at auction (£330,000 for an imperial - the equivalent of eight bottles - of Screaming Eagle, anyone?), but that is still more of an American phenomenon. The record for the most ever paid for a single (750ml) bottle of wine is still held by Bordeaux - in 1985, Christie's sold a 1787 Chateau Lafite for £105,000.
I didn't have that sort of money to spend. I didn't need to have; most wine at winebid.com is priced in the order of tens or hundreds of dollars.
I slapped down a bid on the cheapest bottle I could find: one of a case of Chateau Pichon-Longueville Comtesse de Lalande 1996, as it happened. The site carries estimates of how much each bottle is expected to fetch, which inevitably influences the bidding quite considerably. This one was set at $65-$80, and bids for one or more bottles were inevitably clustering around the lower end of this scale. Exercising prudence, I chose not to have the computer automatically raise my money for me if I was outbid and went away, secretly hoping that I would not be called upon to fork out $65 plus buyer's premium (12.5 per cent of the hammer price), insurance (1 per cent), VAT and shipping.
By the time an e-mail arrived a few seconds later to let me know my bid had been accepted, I wanted the wine. Desperately. For days I heard nothing, an indication that the bottle was still mine. On New Year's Day, I switched on my computer to find that I'd been outbid at 8.50pm the night before, ten minutes before the auction closed. It had gone for $73.13. Rats.
Last-minute bidding is, in fact, a classic technique. If auctions are still active at the published time of closure, Winebid will close them "dynamically" - in other words, extend the bidding time for up to an hour until the frenzy dies down - to squeeze the most money possible out of the bidders. But who can be bothered to trawl through the net at a fixed time (thereby losing all the web's conveniences and none of its disadvantages) when it would be so much more fun to venture down to London's New Bond Street and do the thing properly?
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