DRESSED IN scruffy jeans, a tight, gray T-shirt and cowboy boots, Rudy Kurniawan slid into a front-row seat at a Christie's Beverly Hills auction room. He didn't blend with the cashmere and Cole Haan crowd hoping to pick up a few bottles of rare and old wine. And it wasn't just his wardrobe.
In a few short hours that Saturday afternoon, the then-29-year-old Indonesian-born Kurniawan spent an estimated $500,000. For one case of 24 half-bottles of 1947 Chateau Cheval Blanc, the famed St. Emilion premier cru, he dropped $75,000. Then he bought a second case of the same wine for nearly as much.
A week later, he went on another spending spree at a Zachys auction at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. Then came buying binges in New York at Sotheby's and at an Acker Merrall & Condit auction. During the last several years, Kurniawan has spent an estimated $1 million a month bidding at nearly every auction of old and rare wine in the country.
He spoke heavily accented English when he came to Los Angeles to attend Cal State Northridge 11 years ago, had his first taste of fine wine only six years ago, and makes his home in Arcadia. But Kurniawan has enough family money to have amassed one of the world's premier wine collections, estimated at its peak to be more than 50,000 bottles of the most celebrated Bordeaux and Burgundy wines of the last century.
And he's still buying. Though he's culled his old wine collection, selling off duplicates in two recent Acker Merrall sales that grossed $35.4 million, he continues to buy entire cellars directly from other collectors as well as at auction, and he's investing heavily in young wine as it is released from Europe's top producers.
Simple passion is his explanation. "I'm not a collector. I'm a drinker," Kurniawan says, his eyes smiling behind black-framed glasses sporting the silver dagger insignia of rocker-chic jeweler Chrome Hearts. Now 30, he gels his straight black hair off his soft-featured face. "People who know me and come to see my cellar know that they can drink whatever they want. Wine is something you open and you share."
A slight man whose unconscious self-confidence is the only tip-off that he's old enough to drink, Kurniawan would rather the world didn't know much about him. He won't disclose the identify of his family or the source of their fortune. His father, he says, gave him an Indonesian surname that is different from the family's Chinese name to allow him to maintain his autonomy.
