19 Feb January & February 2026 Post-Auction Report

In January & February 2026 The Wine Auction Room hosted four wine auctions plus the Buy Now event following our February Live Auction:

• Summer Break Wine Auction (26 December – 12 January)
• Auckland & Australia Long Weekend Sale (21 Jan – 26 January
• February Rare & Fine Wine Live Auction (2 February)
• Single Vendor: Burgundy & Beyond Wine Auction (11 February – 16 February)

These closed on a total of 1057 bottles across 595 lots. Following on from extremely successful results in Q4 2025, we continue to see strong demand in the New Zealand secondary market with 28 lots selling for over $1000 a bottle. 

Top Sellers
Our top five sales for January & February 2026 were:

• 2004 Ornellaia (3l), Tuscany ($3055)
• 2x 1990 Chateau Cheval Blanc, Bordeaux ($2467.50 each)
• 2012 Bollinger Vielles Vignes Francaises Blanc de Noir, Champange ($2350)
• 1982 Chateau Latour, Bordeaux ($2350)
• 2010 Domaine Armand Rousseau 1er Cru Clos St Jacques Gevery-Chambertin, Burgundy ($2250)

New Zealand
New Zealand wines represented 31% of our sales over this period down slightly from an average of 42% in 2025, in part due to our single vendor Burgundy auction. 

Our top New Zealand sale was a bottle of 2004 Destiny Bay Magna Praemia, Waiheke which sold for $515, slightly above high estimate. We also saw strong results for other vintages of Destiny Bay Magna Praemia and Mystae and Bell Hill Pinot Noir, with these three wines representing 12 of our top 16 top sales (there were two wines in the 15th spot), the other four wines were bottles of 1998 Te Mata Coleraine and 2017 Kusuda Pinot Noir; and magnums of 2013 Rippon Mature Vines Pinot Noir and 2023 Te Mata Coleraine. 

43% of our New Zealand sales were over $100 a bottle, up on our 2025 average of 37%. This included wines from over 20 different producers. Every month we an uptick in producers and wines selling over this benchmark.

Wines to watch:
While there are only a handful of styles that regularly sell over the $100 benchmark (Bordeaux Blends, Syrah, Pinot Noir and a handful of Chardonnay bottlings) there are also many other fantastic New Zealand wines that have performed well. Riesling from a handful of top producers (and one notable outlier) performed especially well with bottlings from Felton Road, Dry River, Craggy Range and Black Barn all selling at or above high estimate. Likewise, Te Mata’s ‘second’ Cabernet blend Awatea has continued to perform well, with six bottles of the 2015 vintage selling for just under $100 a bottle (for content, the 2024 vintage is about to release at $49.95 a bottle).

Australia
Australia represented about 10% of our top sales over this period with our very top sale being a magnum of ‘04 Penfolds Grange selling at $1527.50, 9% above high estimate. We also saw high value sales for several other vintages of Grange; alongside bottles of Penfolds Bin 707 Cabernet Sauvignon, Henschke Hill of Grace Shiraz, Jim Barry Armagh Shiraz and Rockford Basket Press Shiraz. There was also significant interest in powerful Aussie reds from the late 90’s and early 2000s with wines from Penfolds (Bins 28, 128 and 708), Petaluma and Tim Adams selling well above our high estimates. 

France
French Wine made up around 45% of our sales due to our single vendor Auction which focused on the wines of Burgundy. Our high-end sales of French wine are growing increasingly diverse, with our Jan / Feb Top 10 including five wines from Bordeaux, two wines each from Burgundy and Champagne and one red from the Southern Rhone. Notably, all 10 wines were from different producers. 

Scrolling down, we saw strong demand for White Burgundy from producers like Vincent Dauvissat and Domaine Ramonet as well as mid-tier Bordeaux (we’re thinking wines priced between $100 and $500) with wines from Chateau Cos d’Estournel, Chateau Gazin, Chateau Haut Bages Liberal and Chateau La Grangere all selling above their high estimates. The most popular lot was a bottle of Chateau Lynch-Bages with a damaged label, coming from either the 1962 or 1963 vintage, this had 53 bids in our live auction and eventually sold at $211.50. 

World Wine
We had an especially good showing of high-end Italians in our February Live Auction, our top three sales were all for Jeraboams (3l) of various vintages of the esteemed Super Tuscan Ornellia. Our top 10 international sales was rounded out by the sale of three bottles of wines from Ornellia’s neighbor, Massetto which sold for $1410 per bottle and wines from Bodegas Vega-Sicilia (Ribera de Duero), Dominus (California), Gaja (Piedmont) and La Rioja Alta (Rioja). We also saw good priced achieved for Brunello from both Il Poggione and Argiano and German Riesling from Fritz Haag, Donhoff and Willi Schaefer.

Fortified Wines and Spirts
We once again saw some good sales of spirits and fortifieds with our top sale being a bottle of 40 Year Old St Agnes Grand Reserve XO Australian brandy which sold for $705. We also saw good sales for Single Malt whisky from Springbank and Vintage Port, namely a trio of 1977 wines from Fonsecca, Dow’s and Grahams. 

Takeaways and Investment Advice

• We seen both increased demand and increased prices for both domestic and imported fine wine, continuing a trend that started in Q4 2025. To note, we have had a significant increase in the number of $1000+ per bottle sales in the last two months. This is mirrored in similar trends internationally, with Liv-ex already showing positive growth in most indexes in January 2026 and the fifth consecutive monthly rise for its key Liv-ex 100 index. In The Drinks Business, Liv-ex CEO James Miles describes this as only the start of a market recovery. 

• We are also seeing demand for an ever-increasing wider range of wines. More New Zealand wines are selling over the $100 mark and there is a growing number of international producers whose wines sell via The Wine Auction Room for $1000 or more. This is evidenced in the Liv-ex as well with the Fine Wine 1000 outperforming the Liv-ex 50 and Liv-Ex 100. 

• Sub-$500 Bordeaux is hot! We not only saw this here at The Wine Auction Room, but Liv-Ex’s five top performing wines in Jan 2026 were all Bordeaux reds whose current vintages retail in NZ between around $200 and $500. All five of these wines saw year-on-year growth of between 19.5% and 25%. They were 

And to finish we want to wish you both a happy lunar new year, and for those many wine growers and winemakers who buy, sell and store with us, an extremely successful vintage 2026!