How to Participate in a Hart Davis Hart Wine Auction

Hart Davis Hart (HDH) runs its auctions through a catalog-and-app model: you review the sale's catalog, index, and spreadsheet, then place and manage bids through the HDH Auction App, which also notifies you when an auction goes live and lets you follow producers you care about. This applies to anyone registering for an HDH sale; the specific registration, deposit, and payment requirements are set out in each auction's Terms & Conditions, which you should read before bidding.

Step 1: Find the auction you want to bid in

HDH lists each sale with its own page. From the "Recent Auction Details" section, a typical sale is presented like this:

The lot ranges tell you which session a given bottle falls into, so you can plan around the day it sells rather than the whole sale.

Step 2: Work through the catalog, index, and spreadsheet

Each auction page provides three ways to review the lots:

• Catalog — the full lot listings with descriptions.
• Index — a way to locate lots without paging through the whole catalog.
• Spreadsheet — a downloadable file, useful if you want to sort, filter, or build your own shortlist before bidding.

The page also carries Auction Highlights, Errata, Terms & Conditions, and View Results. Check Errata before bidding: it is where corrections to catalog descriptions appear, and bidding on an uncorrected description is a common way to end up with something other than what you expected.

Step 3: Install the HDH Auction App and set up your bidding

HDH directs bidders to download the HDH Auction App, described on the site as letting you:

• Place and manage your bids from anywhere
• Get notified when an auction goes live
• Follow producers you like and keep track of their lots
• Participate in a live auction directly from your phone

If you collect a specific producer or region, the "follow producers" function is the practical way to avoid manually re-checking the catalog — you get the lots surfaced for you instead.

Step 4: Bid, then check results

Once a sale closes, the same page switches to View Results, so you can confirm what lots actually hammered at. HDH publishes sale outcomes in its news section, which gives you a sense of how competitive a given category is before you commit. Examples from the site:

• September auction: $13.24M in sales, with results across Burgundy, Bordeaux, and California.
• August auction: $3,892,330 total, hammering at 142% of the low estimate, with numerous world-record prices.
• June Finest and Rarest auction: $7M, exceeding the high estimate — described as the fifth consecutive such result.
• Celebration of Burgundy: $14.6M, 100% sold, including the most expensive bottle of Leroy ever auctioned at $95,600.

These figures are useful context for setting your own limits: a sale that hammers well above low estimate means your ceiling needs to be realistic relative to the room, not the catalog.

What to sort out before you bid

• Read the Terms & Conditions for that specific auction. Registration, bidding, and payment mechanics live there, and they are not identical across sales.
• Check the Errata. Catalog corrections are published separately from the main listing.
• Confirm the session and lot range for anything you want, so you know which day it sells.
• Decide your maximum in advance. The August result at 142% of low estimate shows how far competition can push prices past the opening range.

Common sticking points

• Bidding on a closed sale. Pages for past auctions show "This Auction is Now Closed" and only offer results — you cannot bid retroactively.
• Missing a lot because of session timing. Lots are split across days by number; a lot in the second session does not sell on the first day.
• Relying on the catalog alone. The index and spreadsheet exist precisely because large sales run into the thousands of lots (the September sale ran to lot 2674).
• Ignoring producer tracking. If you only want one producer's wines, following them in the app is faster than scanning every lot.

For anyone selling rather than buying, HDH also publishes a collector's perspective on consigning, which is worth reading if your interest is on the sell side rather than the bid side.