Being wealthy is one thing, and being art-buying wealthy is another. Luxury Insider reports that ultra-rich Chinese are beginning to throw their considerable status and wealth around in nontraditional (for Chinese) markets such as art and wine.

The article features a very interesting quote by Kevin Ching, CEO of Sotheby’s in Hong Kong:

“We saw a big surge in Chinese buying in categories that they were not familiar with. We have now seen mainland buying – not in huge quantities – of Western, Impressionist and contemporary art.”

This tells us that wealthy Chinese people are buying items because of their real and perceived worth. They are seeking to become a part of the small circle of western art buyers who spend large sums on buying art. Essentially they are taking cues from the Lambda personalities who they count as their friends or colleagues.

The article also has some key figures that further illustrate China’s growth into a global luxe powerhouse, a crown that once belonged to Japan.

For the first time in Sotheby’s 10-year history in Hong Kong, mainland buyers accounted for nearly 40 percent of Sotheby’s Asian sales during last autumn’s auctions. That figure represents a two-fold jump from 18 percent in the fall of 2008.

Does this newfound interest in expensive art signal a dimming interest in diamonds in Asia? It’s hard to say at this point.

What’s certain is that China’s rapidly growing economy is major impact on the local luxe industry, and that impact is reverberating on the other side of the globe, causing a mad dash by Western’s luxe labels to get a foothold in this booming new luxe market.

Connoisseurship, the art of appreciating fine things and understanding their provenance, importance and distinguishing characteristics, is certainly a worthy way to spend one’s time. Connoisseurs learn about objects that interest them and use that knowledge not (only) to impress people but to make others excited and see what they find so unique and interesting.

Perhaps there’s an element of schadenfreude to it, but I’m always intrigued when self-professed “connoisseurs” reveal a lack of understanding that puts into question the knowledge they think they have. Two upcoming films about the ‘Judgment of Paris,’ the 1976 French wine jury that improbably found a selection of American wines altogether superior to French wines, reveals the conceit on the part of some of the jurors. From an article in Canada’s Globe and Mail:

No nose? Talk about calling the kettle noir. But then, I’ve always advocated calling connoisseurs “cons” for short. I’ve attended far too many professional blind tastings to have much respect for people who boast about their tasting abilities.

Am I being too harsh? I think not. Frankly, to confuse an aristocratic Bâtard-Montrachet from continental-climate Burgundy with a warm-weather Napa chardonnay is the wine equivalent of mistaking a Massenet opera for Cats on Broadway. The tasters knew it, too, which is why some tried to suppress or dismiss the Paris results after the bottles came out of their paper bags

As wines can differ so much by vintage, can we be really be critical of the connoisseur who occasionally gets it wrong? I’d say as long as the stakes are ‘impressing people at a dinner party’ and not ’substantially misvaluing cases of wine for auction,’ it doesn’t matter that much if the connoisseur is occassionally wrong. He or she will be right most of the time, imparting wisdom and helping others learn about something worthy of connoisseurship.

Ahh, wine. Beginner and expert connoisseurs alike can appreciate it for different reasons. I was reminded of this earlier this month when I saw this story about wine psychology in the New York Times. Food writer Robin Goldstein has written a book called "The Wine Trials" in which he found, in a survey of 500 volunteers, that less expensive wines were being rated higher than more expensive wines in blind tests. However, there’s more to the story than that–he found that novice wine drinkers don’t appreciate the same things as more experienced drinkers, and that, as Eric Asimov notes in the article:

Most people in the wine trade understand that consumers have any number of reasons for their buying decisions, whatever their psychological and financial state. Some are reassured by easy-to-understand labels with friendly animals. Others want only naturally produced wines or bottles with a modest carbon footprint. Some are status-seekers and score-chasers, while others are contrarians, or only drink red wine.

The story also mentions how people seem to appreciate wine more when they think it’s more expensive (something we’ve noted on Janus Thinking before). When people are interpreting an item and figuring out it’s value for themselves, how much should the price matter, and how much will this differ among beginners and true connoisseurs?

[Photo by rpeschetz]

Photo by emurray

There was a fascinating article on wine published in Slate this week: The Greatest Wine on the Planet: How the ‘47 Cheval Blanc, a defective wine from an aberrant year, got so good. It’s about how this particular Bordeaux, through a confluence of controllable and uncontrollable factors, became the Bordeaux against which all other Bordeaux are compared. The author, Mike Steinberger, had the chance to try the ‘47 Cheval Blanc at a wine tasting, and described it as

the warmest, richest, most decadent wine I’d ever encountered. Even more striking than its opulence was its freshness. The flavors were redolent of stewed fruits and dead flowers, yet the wine tasted alive; it bristled with energy and purpose.

As one would expect it’s becoming increasingly rare, but it remains at the top of the ‘to-try’ list for many a wine connoisseur. Read the whole article here.

A new academic study suggests that the appreciation of objects may vary on a biological level in connoisseurs’ minds depending on the price of the object. Research by Antonio Rangel of the California Institute of Technology, published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that participants in the study really thought more expensive wines tasted better than cheaper wines. Functional magnetic-resonance imaging measured greater blood flow and mental activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortices (which registers pleasure centers in the brain) of the 20 volunteers according to the reported price of the wine.

Participants rated the same bottle of wine much better when told it was expensive. In a follow-up blind tasting when they weren’t told the prices, participants were not able to detect differences.

Dr. Rangel believes that this suggests that price is performing as a proxy for collective learning–it’s a heuristic for allowing people to quickly evaluate something’s quality. Another possibility is that people enjoy expensive things more (on a biochemical level) because they think they’ll increase their status and mating opportunities.

Can a successful marketing campaign actually make people enjoy luxury goods more than they would otherwise? It’s an intriguing thought for luxury marketers.

[via The Economist]

All our recent talk about counterfeit goods lends itself nicely to this discussion of counterfeit wines on Slate.

The article does a nice job of discussing perhaps the largest counterfeit wine story in recent memory, a story involving Thomas Jefferson, forgery, and multiday bacchanals. In 1988 Bill Koch purchased 4 bottles of wine said to be owned by Thomas Jefferson (they were signed Th. J) for $500,000. Two years ago he had the bottles authenticated and found that Jefferson, a meticulous record keeper, had never noted the bottles and that the signatures were forged. Koch is now suing the man who sold him the wine, a German music promoter and wine merchant (best known for his bacchanalic parties) by the name of Hardy Rodenstock.

How widespread are counterfeit wines? Because many vineyards lack proper records about how much wine was produced and where it went, taste can be the best means of authentication. And according to Allen Meadows, a renowned Burgundy critic, about 10% of the pre-1960 wines that he tastes these days are fraudulent. In the article Meadows notes that in some wine circles alleging fraud is becoming a mark of connoisseurship–it “show[s] off their knowledge and the acuity of their palates.” One hopes that aspiring wine connoisseurs aren’t falsely accusing wines that only taste “young” to seem more knowledgeable than than they are.

Read the full article here.