Auctions are a new way to discover organic wines

Wine auctions can be a good way to discover organic wines. Image: Jesus Cervantes / Shutterstock

In a context of growing online wine sales, auctions are another way to enrich your cellar with treasured bottles that are sometimes impossible to find elsewhere. Buyers from China, South Korea and Taiwan are among the nationalities using the international platform IDealwine. And it's not necessarily conventional wine that they're looking for...

With offices in Paris and Bordeaux as well as in Hong Kong, iDealWine has become a global reference in the field of online auctions in the space of 22 years. The platform has succeeded in offering sought-after bottles that are especially appealing to wine lovers. The website has also become a go-to for participating in auctions—a must for collectors or amateurs who want to get their hands on otherwise inaccessible wines. In 2021, auction sales amounted to €27.4 million. Buyers came from 60 countries and acquired 190,614 bottles.

Contrary to what you might think, it's not so-called conventional wines that are the most popular on the site. In fact, 60% of sales were organic, biodynamic or natural wines. However, the market is not shifting towards greater representation of this type of production. Collectors are actually using iDealwine as a tool to get their hands on bottles that complement the supply in their country of residence. Take Taiwan, for instance, where some 64% of the wines purchased by consumers were labeled as biodynamic. The platform considers that its customers come to iDealwine to find niche, cutting-edge estates that are often part of the organic trend.

In the United Kingdom, as well as in China, people seem to have a taste for buying wines at auction that hail from a more environmentally friendly viticulture. In these two countries, only 27% of the bottles purchased were conventional wines. According to iDealwine, British customers' purchases are characterized by very eclectic choices, but also by a high number of iconic names from different regions. As such, the platform points out that the stars of the moment are mostly organic, biodynamic or natural. China, meanwhile, has a local market that is already well supplied with conventional wines, says iDealwine.

Unlike buyers in Hong Kong, Luxembourg, Switzerland, South Korea and the Netherlands, the share of conventional wines exceeds 50% in Portugal (61%), Estonia (51%) and Poland (51%).

Beyond the question of the type of viticulture, preferences for specific regions differ from one country to another. While Danes love Bordeaux (40% of sales) as well as inhabitants of Singapore (60%), Japanese buyers raise a glass to Burgundy bottles (50%). Buyers in Japan also confirm that they are great lovers of champagne, with the share of bottles sold there being higher than in any other country (8%).