Cellar's market

It was only a rumour he'd leave the country if Labour got in, so tough luck if your vote was also intended to help Andrew Lloyd-Webber on his way. It looks like he's staying here - and in Manhattan, Cap Ferrat and Tipperary. His Sydmonton Court wine cellar, however, 18,000 bottles, or 49 more years worth of wine at a pounds 100-plus bottle a day, is going. Starting with a gala evening to the clink of champagne glasses, rather than the strains of Starlight Express, the biggest single-owner collection offered at auction, estimated to fetch over pounds 2 million, goes under the hammer at Sotheby's on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The Andrew Lloyd-Webber Wine Collection is billed by Sotheby's as "a roll-call of the most beautiful, and perhaps the most opulent, wines ever to be created". Too busy to browse? For you, sir, a handy off-the-shelf "Super Lot Millennium Dream Cellar" estimated to sell for between pounds 150,000 and pounds 200,000 and a "Bordeaux First Growth Super Lot", up for grabs at pounds 75 - pounds 95,000. Every case comes branded ALW.

Drooling over the catalogue, it's hard not to go just a little bit green around the gills. Glossy colour photos of the finest and rarest adorn each page with almost pornographic indecency. There's more than enough of the three de-luxe vintage champagnes for instance, Dom Perignon, Krug and Roederer Cristal (estimates up to pounds 1,500 a case for the 1985 Dom Perignon and Roederer Cristal Rose), to put a smile back on the faces of the entire Sunset Boulevard cast.

Case after case of blue-chip First Growth claret is almost entirely from the four best Bordeaux vintages of recent times: 1982,1986, 1989 and 1990. But these pale into insignificance next to the likes of the 1947 Chateau Cheval-Blanc (up to pounds 30,000 a case), 1947 Chateau Latour Pomerol ( pounds 20,000), 1947 Petrus (pounds 24,000), 1900 Chateau d'Yquem (pounds 3,000 a bottle) and, the darling of the Far East, 1982 Chateau Le Pin (pounds 30,000).

Domaine de la Romanee-Conti takes pride of place in red Burgundy (pounds 9,000 for the 1964 la Romanee), while the Rhone selection is graced by Guigal's highly marketable Cote Roties, including the 1985 La Turque (estimate pounds 3,000). The only New World wine in the list, Australia's 1982 Penfolds Grange Hermitage, is expected to fetch up to pounds 1,300 a case. There's vintage port, too, but wines from Italy, Spain and California are notable by their absence.

Even for someone as obviously hedonistic as the 49-year-old Lord Lloyd- Webber, he does seem to have rather absent-mindedly overestimated his drinking requirements. It's tempting in fact to compare him to some of the famously anally retentive international collectors, whose cellars are little more than extensions of their massive egos. A substantial proportion of the Lloyd-Webber cellar consists of obvious blue-chip investment wines and "collectables" bought off the shelf at another recent grand auction, that of Master of Wine Remington Norman at Christies in June 1994. Collectables, according to the AmericanWine Spectator, "are the wines all the other collectors want".

But Lloyd-Webber claims to have collected and enjoyed wines since he bought Chateau Palmer 1961 (it now sells for pounds 3,500) as a schoolboy at Westminster for pounds 11 a case. According to Lindsay Hamilton of Farr Vintners, who knows Lloyd-Webber, "he does know about wine and he was very involved in the selection of his cellar, which was purchased before the massive price hikes generated in 1992 and 1993 by the Far East. He's done very well." Sotheby's Serena Sutcliffe says Lloyd-Webber has already started buying again, specifically 1995 Bordeaux and Burgundy. The francophile emphasis suggests a combination of conservative taste and shrewd market judgment.

So who's rushing to snap up the cellar? Serena Sutcliffe confirms there's an avalanche of pre-sale bids already in, mainly from the Far East, North and South America and Germany. It's a good time to sell. As the American critic Robert Parker says: "The growing demand for the limited amount of great wine in the world continues to accelerate as the Pacific Rim countries and Central America (especially Mexico) fuel the demand for the finest wines." As for prices, Hamilton predicts "the cachet will stick. There'll be a lot of heavy hitters bidding, most of them for the kudos or publicity they'll get from the auction". Expect records to be broken