The Lincolnshire vintage wine collection that amazed everyone
A collection of vintage wine that stunned the auctioneering team asked to organise its disposal is to go under the hammer in a remarkable auction on Wednesday afternoon.
Amassed by a wealthy businessman over a period of forty-five years, the cellar at his home in mid-Lincolnshire contained over two thousand bottles of vintage port, champagne, wine and whisky. Some of the bottles in the hoard today retail for hundreds of pounds – each!
Paul Cooper, a director of auctioneers Eddisons said: “We walked into it all pretty much cold. The executors handling the estate of the businessman had mentioned that there was 'quite a lot of wine in the cellar'. That turned out to be the understatement of the year”.
“The two-room wine cellar was racked floor to ceiling throughout and there were also cases and boxes piled on the floor, some of them never opened. And no one had even mentioned the collection of fine whiskies in the dining room or the white wines chilling in the fridge or the reds in racks in the kitchen. It was everywhere.”
Two Luton vans were required to transport it all to the Eddisons national auction centre in Scunthorpe where it is to be sold in an online auction that ends on Wednesday afternoon (December 3rd) - 418 lots, two-thousand-and-sixty-nine bottles (and four rare porcelain whisky decanters).
The oldest bottle in the sale is a 1955 Croft's port, a year that according to experts produced 'a long-lived' wine that is said to remain exceptional to this day. Wine merchant prices for a bottle are today close to £400.
The ports in the auction also include a bottle of Warre's from the 'fabulous' 1963 vintage, regarded by connoisseurs as the best port vintage of the 20th century.
Paul said: “Those two bottles - and a couple more 1960s ports - are the collection’s outliers in terms of age. Most of the rest of the three dozen vintage ports date from the 1980s, which is when the businessman began taking a serious interest. All the rest of the huge number of bottles of vintage wines and spirits date from the late eighties through to 2023”.
The champagne from the cellar runs to 239 bottles that are to be sold in 40 lots. There are 42 bottles of Ruinart, the oldest of today's champagne houses, founded in 1729, including two bottles of the 1986 Dom Ruinart Brut Rose that usually come with a price tag of around £500.
The 67 bottles of whisky include decades old malts from many of the famous distillers including one lot that brings together a Macallan and a Glen Garioch, a lot that topped £200 weeks ago. The whiskies also include a 1980s Prince of Wales Welsh whisky, a bottle of House of Commons Whisky and four of the highly collectable ceramic decanters created in the 1980s by the Royal Victoria Pottery for Gordon Highlander Whisky (the Fly Fishing and Foxhunting decanters) and Pointers (the Thoroughbred Racing and British Farming decanters).
Paul said: “We’ve handled the liquidation of the assets of various wine merchants, and restaurants around the country in the last couple of years but I have to say we've never seen anything quite like this before.”
The auction is available at https://auctions.eddisonsassets.com/auctions. It is an online auction scheduled to end at 1pm on Wednesday December 3rd.