Wines as expensive as luxury cars at Christie's sale of fine, rare spirits

The selection spans over 240 years, from a bottle of Madeira 1775 to Bordeaux 2015, says Edwin Vos, the international head of fine wines at the British auction house.

After a visit to a private cellar in California in 1972, Michael Broadbent, the late critic who introduced fine wine auctions in Christie’s, described it as “perfection”. 

The owner of the cellar was Benjamin Ichinose, a Japanese-American collector.

Ichinose was a US Army captain practising orthodontics in Yokohama, Japan, before he returned to the San Francisco Bay Area and began a pursuit of wine with his wife. He would go on to amass a collection of over 55,000 bottles — mostly French, Californian and German wines, port, sherry and madeira. 

He also took care to find the choicest vintages corresponding