'Honest' bottle blunders among vintage whines of collectors

With Hong Kong emerging as one of the world's important wine trading hubs, an increasing number of 'honest mistakes' is also being discovered - cases of wine, for example, with bottles missing or mislabelled.

Although most major auction houses have a policy of carefully inspecting every bottle they sell, merchants and collectors fear a rise in problematic wines as more and more stock ends up in the city. By some estimates, an average of about 25 out of every 1,000 bottles coming into the city are problematic in some way.

'My worry, and what a lot of people think about, is if you buy a case of 2009 Petrus and, in 25 years, somebody actually opens it and wants to drink it and there're only 11 bottles in there, what are you going to do? Legally, you have no chance to claim back your loss,' local cigar and wine merchant Thomas Bohrer said.

'Alternatively, what about, if instead of 12 bottles of 2009, there are 12 bottles of 2008 in there. Now, because of the value of these wines, for a case, you can buy a medium-sized car. This is real money. And there are not only one or two cases around. There are hundreds of thousands of cases.'

The stock of expensive wines has been swelling in Hong Kong since the government decided in 2008 to scrap the 40 per cent import duty. Major auction houses, merchants, storage companies and other related businesses promptly set up shop here in the hope of tapping strong Asian and mainland demand.

In 2009, Hong Kong's auction sales of fine wine exceeded those of London. Last year they likely topped those of New York.