Michael Egan: Wine Detective, Part Two

Mar. 23, 2016

Throughout his long career, world-renowned wine detective Michael Egan has been involved in almost every aspect of fine wine selling and collecting. He has seen the industry drastically change over the last 35 years, and in the second part of our conversation he shares his thoughts on the state of the industry and discusses how he became a part of it.

How did you get started in wine? What made you want to work with wine?

I went to University in England, at Manchester, and got an honor’s degree in English Literature and History. Originally, I wanted to be a journalist, but my family has always been in wine, here in France.  My grandfather was an Irish wine merchant in Limerick, and my grandmother came from a well-known merchant family here in Bordeaux.

So, after I did my three years at Manchester I did another year of study at Bordeaux, essentially to learn about basic winemaking and wine tasting, and from there I went back to London and started in retail. I worked for a company called Ogden’s, which at the time was one of the more interesting chain of wine stores to work in because their policy was to find interesting wines on the spur of the moment. So from one week to the next you wouldn’t know what the new stock would be. I worked there for a year and then I managed to get into Sotheby’s, starting off just doing the administration, looking after the wine before and after the sales, getting the wines dispatched.

You were working at Sotheby’s in administration, but you wanted to do more than logistics. How did that happen?

Eventually the opportunity came for me to be a cataloger. That means looking at the wines and describing them and cataloging them. Bit-by-bit I began doing more field trips and looking at people’s cellars and packing them up. This was during the golden era when people still had very big wine collections which had been built up over the years. But rather than as it is today, buying from specialized merchants or auctions, the family cellars I saw had didn’t have very great wines, but instead a big range of day-to-day drinking wines. But most of them had been forgotten. So you’d have ordinary Muscadet or Petit Bordeaux Châteaux alongside the very great. I think it gave us all at Sotheby’s a good insight into how the great families used to entertain. They would have wines for the staff, wines for the family and wines for the big occasions.

It sounds like the big collections were much more alive than they are today.

I think that’s right. In those days, the 1970s and 80s, the first [growth wines] weren’t hugely more expensive than the second. So you’re talking Mouton Rothschild or Lafite going for £600 to £700 per case [$860 - $1000], like a Château Palmer would be £200 to £250 pounds per case [$280 - $360]. The difference wasn’t four or five times as it is today. Therefore our clients were more professional people such as doctors, lawyers, dentists.

Do you feel that there’s been a change in collections since the 1970s and 1980s and today, with more people purchasing as investments rather than as something to enjoy?

Unfortunately I think it is, because the price is so high, and it continues to climb. In the fine wine market, you do get plateaus where the prices stop rising and you get the trough, unfortunately. And looking at the behavior in the UK, there are a lot of people just collecting wine and storing it in warehouses. Here in Bordeaux, the château owners hate people speculating on wine. They want it out there to be consumed. But the paradox is, their opening price is very high, so it sort of spoils the enjoyment for most people. It’s beyond most peoples’ means, if you’re thinking about opening up a $1000 bottle of wine. You have to think hard. And that’s just the opening price for a Château Latour.

Is that why we’ve seen more forgeries in the last 30 years?

Undoubtedly. That’s the logic behind people like [Rudy] Kurniawan and Hardy Rodenstock, because they see they can make a very quick profit on something which everyone wants. Also, [because of] the rarity, they can pull the wool over people’s eyes and say that there were these very large formats produced of Château Pétrus and other first growths, far more than were actually produced, going all the way back to the 1920s. And that’s where I’ve seen a lot of fake items in large formats, and very old.

Going into old family collections, what did you find there that is different from collections today?

You would have most of the wines in these very big bins which could hold maybe 100 bottles or more, covered in dust. We’re talking wines 30, 40, 50-years-old. It was damp, and there was some cork spoilage, but they were stored under generally good conditions. What we did not find so much was wine in original wooden cases. Now, people lay a lot credence in keeping their wines in original packaging so it can be sold as such, and [thus] get a premium on the price.

As the 1990s went along, we saw more and more disparity between very young stock in original wooden cases and these very strange large formats and very rare old wines, which didn’t have a logic to be there. And these were the ones which these people were buying from Hardy Rodenstock. [Sotheby’s] refused a lot of those wines, to the chagrin of the owners. We would have to be as tactful as we could, saying ‘we can’t guarantee the authenticity, unfortunately.’ And sometimes the client would say, ‘well if you’re not selling those, we’re not putting anything into auction.’ We lost a big potential consignment because of that.