Auction house Sotheby’s will stage its first online Moutai sale in London, with bids closing today.

The sale, named “Vintage Moutai | Spirit of China” offers 12 lots with a combined estimated value in the region of £300,000.

An original wooden crate of “Sun Flower” Kweichow Moutai from 1972, expected to fetch £200,000-£450,000, headlines the sale.

The other 11 single bottles of Kweichow Moutai, all from the early 1970s, are in remarkable condition for their age and are still wrapped in their original tissue paper.

The demand for Moutai has been on the rise globally in recent years. In June 2021, Sotheby’s sold 24 bottles of “Sun Flower” Kweichow Moutai 1974 for £1 million in London, which realised the highest price for a single lot of Moutai outside of China and also the most valuable Moutai lot the auction house had offered to date.

The current online sale showcases some of the rarest bottles of Kweichow Moutai ever offered for auction outside of Asia, all of which come with traceable provenance.

The bottles were originally purchased by Chef Tso, who was born in Kiangsu, a city near Nanjing, before moving first to Shanghai, and then Hong Kong, and subsequently in 1958, at the age of 29, to Brazil.

In São Paulo he worked at three of the biggest Chinese restaurants in the city, becoming the highest-paid Chinese chef during this time. He then moved to Belo Horizonte, the capital city of south-eastern Brazil’s Minas Gerais state, and became the operator of Yun Ton Restaurant.