Giorgio Pinchiorri: an auction for history. “The Enoteca doesn’t have to prove anything to anyone”

After the already very important one at Zachy’s, which, with 2,500 bottles of Enoteca Pinchiorri, collected 3.2 million pounds, the jewels of Giorgio Pinchiorri’s huge wine collection, as reported and anticipated yesterday by WineNews, will be the protagonist of a truly unrepeatable auction: on December 6, in Geneva, at BagheraWines will be auctioned 24 unique pearls of the world’s wine, 12 Jeroboam and 12 Mathusalem of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, including the number 1 unpublished labels on the “Millesime 1985” of the various crus of the Burgundy myth (Romanée-Conti, La Tache, Richerbourg, Echezaux, Grands Echezeaux and Romaneé St Vivant),universally recognized as one of the greatest vintages of the twentieth century, which have never moved from the cellar of the Enoteca Pinchiorri in Florence, Michelin-starred temple of high Italian gastronomy, with the sole exception of the year 2011, when they were brought back to the Domaine, in Vosne-Romanée in France, to be sealed with new wax and to renew their “youth”.Absolutely the most valuable prices, with an estimated value of 2 million Swiss francs (around 1.8 million euros) of the “Kingdoms” auction, which will be beaten by the Swiss auction house. A truly unique auction, and to tell its genesis, previewed at WineNews, is Giorgio Pinchiorri himself, owner, with his wife Annie Feolde, of the legendary Enoteca Pinchiorri: “this time I try to tell it first how it went, even if, for me, I would have done without it, both the previous time and this one, because I’m old-fashioned and this obviously does not want to be an excuse, but I am part of a generation for which business was done and not told. And so - writes Pinchiorri - I try to tell you how it went, and I start this letter quoting a man that I have always esteemed very much, who makes me proud to be Italian. The phrase “if you can dream it, you can do it” is by Enzo Ferrari and that’s exactly what happened. In my previous letter, in which I explained how the auction of my wines with Zachy’s was born, I closed in this way: “... At the beginning of 2019 we thought about two great events that could remain in the history of wine and bring value to the name of the Enoteca, to what it represented and what it represents. Covid19, at least in this case, has nothing to do with it!”.
In these years I don’t know how many requests I have received, maybe a few hundred, from the most famous auction houses to the biggest collectors in the world, who to the sound of euro - many - have tried to convince me several times. In recent times, two great friends, wine connoisseurs, with whom I had done good business in the past, made some proposals that at first, I confess, I was surprised. Surely 20 years ago I would not have even considered them, but today Enoteca Pinchiorri, without false modesty, no longer needs to prove anything to anyone, our journey in the kitchen and in the cellar is the result of sacrifice and hard work and the merits of this success are only the people who work there; everything else, including my beloved and suffered cellar, does nothing but exalt these aspects. In November 2019, our Swiss friends came to the Enoteca for dinner one evening. For them - says Pinchiorri again - we uncorked some of the rarest bottles of my cellar. When you open certain bottles, the air in the room becomes electric even for Alessandro Tomberli, my director, who has seen bottles pass through these years. After dinner, my friends ask me if we can have a coffee the next day late in the morning before their departure; of course I accept and the next day, during coffee, they present me the proposal in all its details: where, when, how, how much.
“If you can dream it, you can do it”, and it's the truth: they dreamed it, I had to make the decision. And I decided to do it, I decided to accept their crazy request, because it came at the most important historical moment of the Enoteca: important because a team so close to the Enoteca has never been there; important for the projects we have planned; important, yes, also for the turnover achieved and this is not a secondary aspect for a reality that lives “only” of catering; and last but not least, important because the world would talk about it, I was sure about it.
After a previous auction organized by the same Swiss friends and concerning a thousand bottles bequeathed by the mythical Henri Jayer, an auction that reached unexpected goals, everyone would have talked about the wine auction of the Enoteca Pinchiorri. And if you can dream it, you can do it.
On December 5, 2020 the Enoteca Pinchiorri will be in Geneva for a dinner reserved to the most important wine collectors in the world, a dinner that will anticipate by one day the auction of one of the treasures of the wine cellar of the Enoteca. This sale will also give me the possibility to allocate a percentage of the proceeds for charity purposes.
When this letter will be published, everyone will interpret it as they want, but this is what really happened”. Words signed by Giorgio Pinchiorri, to anticipate a wine auction that, without any doubt, is destined to remain in the history of wine collecting worldwide.