Wine Buyers Look Online for Lafite and Latour

As Hong Kong's glitzy hotels play host to ever more wine auctions, with furious paddle-waving and Asian bidders showered with samples of expensive bottles, a new battle for sales is taking place online.

Anonymous bidders, identified by screen names like 'LAFITE4EVER' (referring to Asia's favorite, Château Lafite-Rothschild) are buying from the near-constant Internet-only sales offered by the likes of Acker Merrall & Condit, America's oldest wine shop, and California-based Spectrum Wine Auctions.

Compared with traditional sales events, Internet auctions typically offer smaller units of sale (a single bottle, for example, rather than a case) and less-expensive wines. That means online bidders are unlikely to be the trade buyers and investors that crowd live sales.

'It's the drinking man's auction, and it's a great way to get educated,' said John Kapon, president of New York-based Acker, which runs monthly online-only sales. 'There's still a lot of overlap between the Internet and live, but the Internet sales allow us to offer items we can't offer in the live auctions.'

Spectrum runs online-only sales every two weeks, with bottles sold for as little as $1 and as much as $10,000 for a case of Bordeaux's Château Latour. Still, that price pales in comparison with live-auction hauls like the case of Lafite 1982 sold for $77,675 at Spectrum's wine auction last month in Hong Kong.

For those unable to attend live sales in Hong Kong or elsewhere, most other houses offer real-time online bidding during the auctions, sometimes with streaming video of the auctioneer. Online-only sales, however, allow bidders to buy between the live sales.

'We have a continuous flow of wine always online,' said Spectrum President Jason Boland, who noted that Spectrum's last online auction garnered 5,000 bids for around 2,230 lots offered.

Spectrum and Acker both said it's faster to send wine to online buyers than the winners of live sales because of easier logistics. Spectrum plans to launch an application for Apple's iPhone by the end of the summer so people can bid while away from their computers, and Acker expects to overhaul its website later this year to accommodate increasing demand.

Live sales aren't going away any time soon. Acker plans to raise a record $10 million from the Internet this year, yet a single live sale can exceed that. Spectrum said Internet sales are growing fast but account for only 5% of its business so far.