A collection of 16,889 bottles of high-end wines from an anonymous seller known only as the Transcendent Collector has set a sales record of £23 million at auction in Hong Kong.

Sotheby’s had predicted the three-day sale would fetch a total of $26 million (£19.9m), a figure that would have already set a new world record for a single-owner wine collection.

The collection, which it described as being of "a scale the like of which has never been seen before", included first-growth Bordeaux and grand cru Burgundies, as well as an extensive set of Dom Perignon champagnes dating as far back as 1926 and Krug vintages spanning six decades from the 1950s.

The auction also included more than 275 lots of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, the most coveted Burgundy wine, from vintages spread over five decades. Last year, one of the vineyard’s bottles from the 1945 vintage broke the world record for a single bottle when it was sold in New York for $558,000.

Sotheby’s said that sought-after Bordeaux, such as La Mission Haut-Brion 1945 and bottles of Chateau Lafite 1961, were also among the wines sold, along with 600 lots of Domaine Coche-Dury, including Corton-Charlemagne from 1988 to 2012 and Meursault Perrières bottled between 1982 and 2014.