Sotheby’s Hong Kong sells wine worth $6.7 mn in 2010

HONG KONG - The Sotheby’s auction house said Tuesday that it sold a record $6.76 million of wine in Hong Kong in 2010, more than it sold the world over in 2009.

The auction total came in a year that Sotheby’s raised $11.34 million through wine auctions worldwide, more than double 2009’s $5.37 million.

The total was the highest in the company’s 40 years of wine auctions. Sales in Hong Kong surged 268 percent from 2009, Sotheby’s said.

“This has been a landmark year,” Serena Sutcliffe, global head of wine at Sotheby’s, said. “We achieved our largest-ever total and now hold the record for a standard-sized bottle, a bottle in any format and for a wine lot sold at auction.”

Hong Kong this year emerged as the world centre for wine auctions, outselling London and New York combined, according to both Sotheby’s and rival auction house Christie’s.

More than 60 percent of the world’s best wines are now bought by Asian collectors through Hong Kong auctions.

A wine collection owned by British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber is to be auctioned in Hong Kong on January 22 and was expected to fetch up to $4.1 million, Sotheby’s said.