Hospices de Beaune Auction Sale 2016

As every year, we will join the famous Hospices de Beaune Sale.

Alain corcia will buy wines for company’s use and for our customers.

If you wish to buy with us, please get in touch with us.

We are in a position as a Beaune based negociant to age your wine in our traditionnal natural vaulted cellars

For several centuries, the method used by the Hospital for the sale of its wines was by private, mutual agreement, à l’amiable.

After the Revolution, sale by private agreement seems to have been abandoned and replaced by sale by written submissions, the offer for sale of the harvest being announced by way of notices to the wine-merchants of the region. A date limit was fixed for the deposition of offers before the Commission. Submissions were not allowed to mention any external indication other than the price proposed. The envelope bearing the highest offer was the only one opened, providing however that the offer price was higher than a minimum fixed in advance by the Board of Management. The adjudication was made in favour of the wine-merchant whose name was contained inside the envelope. When the offer was considered insufficient, the sale was cancelled and put back to a later date. The Hôtel-Dieu, whose vines were already remarkably positioned and the wines sought after, did not always find buyers without difficulty, however.

In the middle of the XIXth Century, the Economist of the Hospices, Mr Joseph PETASSE, who was also a talented poet, proposed to the Commission to go directly to the market, both in France and abroad, and to sell the wines directly to private buyers. He undertook remarkable journeys throughout France, Belgium, Holland and Germany, spread over two years and at the end of which all the wines in stock had been sold. Upon his return, he declared to his administrative management: “Gentlemen, you may recommence from this year (1851) the sale by public auction; it is henceforward not worth bothering ourselves; our clientele is in place, our wines are well-known and from now on the lovers of wine will come to us”. It was true that sale at auction had been tried once already by the Hôtel-Dieu. In 1820, the Minister of Finance had advised sale at auction. The Prefect had himself recalled the means prescribed for the sale of wines and the Commission finally resolved to do it in 1825. It appears that the practice surprised buyers. It was only in 1859 that the system in use today, that of sale at auction, imposed itself definitively. The auction has taken place in the market hall since 1959. Previously, and from 1925, it had taken place in the vat-house itself. Before 1925, the Public gathered in the interior courtyard of the Hôtel-Dieu, in the Cour d’Honneur, decorated for the occasion with ancient tapestries. The buyers were grouped in the great hall of the Council, today the Chambre du Roy, on the first floor. This room itself became too crowded to receive all the wine amateurs and had to be abandoned for the vat-house.