As much as he loves to own great wine, Sultan will walk away from a deal that doesn’t suit him. In the mid-1980s, he was asked by his Paris dealer, Marie-Hélène Montenay, to visit the Moueix family, who own, among other Bordeaux, the region’s priciest wine, Château Pétrus, whose 2005 vintage sells for upwards of $70,000 per case. The family patriarch, Jean-Pierre Moueix, who died in 2003, was a passionate art collector (he owned Francis Bacon’s 1976 Triptych, which was sold by the family in May at Sotheby’s New York for $86.3 million) and wanted a Sultan drawing he’d seen at Montenay’s gallery. In exchange, he offered one of several magnums of Pétrus 1945 in his personal cellar. Sultan didn’t think it was a fair exchange. “I told him, ‘You’re asking me to trade something that I have only one of for something that you have more than one of.’ ” The artist’s wine instincts served him well: Although Bordeaux’s 1945 “victory” vintage is legendary, Pétrus was inconsistent that year.

Despite all this experience, Sultan is no insufferable wine snob. He’s ready to opt for a low-priced alternative even when he doesn’t have to. At a recent dinner at Café Boulud, a Manhattan bastion of haute cuisine, his host, the Houston art dealer Meredith Long, ordered a $700 bottle of Château Cheval Blanc. In soft hill-country tones, Sultan relates, "I told Meredith, ‘You don’t have to do that. Anyone can go for the fancy wine. Let the sommelier choose a terrific wine at a low price to match our food. If he’s good, he’ll find it.’ The next time we had dinner, we did just that, and the sommelier came up with a southern French wine for well under $100."

But Sultan also knows when to pull the cork on a precious bottle. On September 11, 2001, standing outside his home, on Leonard Street in Lower Manhattan, the artist watched the Twin Towers fall. As soon as he could, he headed to Sag Harbor, and on his first night there, he opened his last magnum of the precious Domaine de la Romanée-Conti La Tâche 1969 that he’d gotten from Lawrence Rubin. "I drank it with friends," he says, "out of gratitude that we were alive and fine." "Label Conscious" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's October 2008 Table of Contents .