A bottle of the 1951 experimental Penfolds Grange shiraz red was bought lby a Melbourne buyer for $103,000 - the highest price ever paid for an Australian wine.
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The sale took place at the June 30 Penfolds' Rewards of Patience auction, which has been held six monthly over the past 24 years by the Langton's fine wine auction and private brokerage house.
The wine, the first Grange created by legendary Penfolds chief winemaker Max Schubert, was never commercially released and the previous record price for a bottle was $81,000. It's been described as "modern wine's equivalent of powered flight" and has become part of a Grange mania in which wealthy wine enthusiasts vie to gather full collections of Grange.
Undeterred by the COVID-19 pandemic and global economic crisis, vinous zealots bought 1092 bottles of Penfolds wines at the auction, which set record prices for other Granges. The 1952 Bin 4 Grange Hermitage sold for $46,601 (previous record $38,586 in June 2019) and the 1970 Bin 95 Grange $3501 (previous record $1747 in May). Other prices included the 1954 Bin 11 Grange Hermitage $20,971 and the 1955 Bin 95 Grange Shiraz $12,815. Last December Langton's sold a set of Granges from 1951 to 2015 for $372,800.
The company's head of auctions Tamara Grischy said early 1950s Granges were very rare and collectors snapped them up to complete their sets of every Grange vintage.
The Penfolds sales were preceded on June 28 by the completion of a month-long Langton's online auction of 246 bottles of the great French Burgundy Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (DRC). All but six bottles of the DRC were sold from the 252 on offer from the collection amassed over more than 60 years by wine guru James Halliday.
Halliday said that, as he approached his 82nd birthday, he had decided to sell a selection of wines from his cellar and Langton's will auction vintages from his Australian collection later this year.
Langton's general manager Jeremy Parham said its demand for fine wine had increased since COVID-19 restrictions began in March. The number of online bidders increased by almost 50 per cent and there was a sharp increase in buyers from Langton's website.
COVID-19 restrictions took a heavy toll of Hunter wine country cellar doors, but brought a massive upsurge in online sales and the easing of lockdown regulations since the June long weekend has attracted big crowds to the Hunter's socially distancing wineries.
