On February 8 in Chicago, Hart Davis Hart will auction the Herbert Bridges Harris, Jr Collection, featuring a 12-bottle case of 1976 Domaine de la Romanee-Conti (DRC) Romanee-Conti.
 Herbert Bridges Harris began to focus solely on Burgundy's finest after the 1985 Burgundies |
The collection almost exclusively features the world's finest and rarest Burgundy and Bordeaux, with the 986 lots totalling $4m-6m. The case of Romanee-Conti leads, with an estimate of $50,000-75,000.
Herbert Bridges Harris Jr died in 2013, leaving behind a spectacular wine collection that began in his late 20s. A good friend of Lenoir Josey, one of American's most revered oenophiles, he was a leader of the International Food & Wine Society, the 7th of April Wine Club, and the Chaine des Rotisseurs.
100 lots of DRC wines, worth around $1.4m-2.2m, will cross the block, in addition to six bottles of Henri Jayer Richebourg 1985, which are valued at $48,000-75,000.
The top lots of the sale are almost all Burgundy, which has become the collector's favourite since the burst of the Bordeaux bubble in 2011. The region's market share has risen from 1.2% in 2010 to 6.8% in 2013, and the Liv-ex DRC Index was up 6.9% in value in the 11 months to the end of November.
Like Burgundy, Hart Davis Hart is celebrating a successful 12 months, as it became the top US auction in 2013 with sales of $36m - an impressive growth of 37% in a market where many others have declined.
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