This year’s honorees include a Midwest retailer and two multi-store independents, one in New York and the other in New England.
Dinner at Bonhams: What Wine and Jewels Have in Common
For your next in-store event, why not pair wine with gems? Here’s how Bonhams did it.
Ahead of its New York Fine Jewelry sale last week, Bonhams hosted a special event for select collectors and editors I was able to attend: a tasting in which wines were paired with the auction’s top lots.
Surprisingly, there is a great deal of synergy between the two categories, to the point where I wondered why I had never thought of pairing wine with fine jewelry before.
Bonhams had its own jewelry experts, CEO and Group Jewelry Director Matthew Girling and Director of U.S. Jewelry Susan Abeles, on hand to lead the tasting, along with special guest Bianca Bosker, journalist and author of The New York Times best-selling book “Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste.”
A fantastic idea for in-store events or press previews, here’s how Bonhams and Bosker paired wine with jewels, for a multi-sensory experience.
Characteristics
Girling and Abeles used the sale’s top lot, a 16.9-carat diamond ring that sold for $1.8 million, to illustrate a diamond’s characteristics and how it is graded--the 4Cs.
As the diamond was passed around the room by the wait staff, Bosker spoke about the characteristics by which one judges wine, including sweetness (also known as level of “dryness”), acidity, tannins, body and color.
She paired the impressive diamond with a Wagner-Stempel Riesling Hollberg GG 2015, a surprisingly dry Riesling, using it to illustrate how to properly taste the wine while identifying the aforementioned characteristics.
A post shared by Ashley Davis (@ashleylikesgems) on Sep 21, 2017 at 2:41pm PDT
Provenance
Just as a gemstone’s value is partially determined by where it was mined, a wine’s value and characteristics are also determined in part by where its grapes were harvested.
The auction had several impressive sapphires for sale, and the Bonhams team used them as examples to highlight the significance of different provenances, which affect stone quality and/or value. One grouping of jewels featured stones from Kashmir, while another featured sapphires from Ceylon.
Bosker, meanwhile, had the group taste a Verdet Aurelien Gevrey Chambertin 2012, a pinot noir, to illustrate a wine that is a good representative of a classic wine region, Burgundy.

Similarly, the sale featured an impressive black opal, which the Bonhams team noted could
Guessing Games
The emerald, ruby and diamond brooch that was purchased for $8 at a garage sale, and went on to sell for $26,250, was paired with an interesting vino counterpart: an Exto Gredic Vineyard (toh-kai), Quattro Mani.

Bonhams’ event was so much more interesting than a typical auction preview or the average store trunk show, it had me thinking about other outside-the-box event ideas.
Why not hold an in-store event pairing a different wine with each of the 12 major birthstones, or different champagnes with different bridal styles?
The logic behind the pairings isn’t really as important as creating an event where people are enjoying themselves and learning something. As long as the wine is flowing and there are gems to covet, the possibilities are endless.
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