From famous chateaux ranging from Lafite to Margaux and Mouton, wine lovers had a chance to bid for top French wine in Beijing on Friday at the first wine auction yet on the Chinese mainland.

Around 1,000 bottles of fine wine from France’s renowned Bordeaux area were on auction with a starting price of several hundred to several thousand U.S. dollars Xinhua reports.

94 percent of the wines were sold and over 90 percent of the buyers said they would drink the wines themselves, not for investment.

The wines were selected by French wine expert Claude Maratier and were appraised at a score higher than 90 on the Robert Parker website, with a third of the wines even appraised at 100.

(Parker is a renowned American wine valuer, whose rating system is regarded as authoritative).

Maratier appraised the wine at a fine wine auction by Paris’s City Hall in 2006, the result of the city’s decision to sell some of its cellar.

He is also author of wine books “La Cote des Grands Vins de France” and “Le Vin a Travers la Peinture.”

China’s rich class, though still a very small portion of the population, are an increasingly large group of fine wine consumers.