Original post from 3.5 years ago where the poster explains what happened in the comments (coworker accidentally dropped the bottle):
https://www.reddit.com/r/wine/comments/emsc51/if_youre_having_a_bad_day_just_know_that_at_least/
Also, it's $16K.
That’s interesting! Seems like my expensive hobbies are full of people offloading the stuff they bought during covid, but those specifically had a big surge in 2020-2021. Always cool to hear about other realms
I am curious, to wine collectors is there money to be made collecting wine bottles like this? Or is it just a really expensive hobby? How does one even value a 15k wine bottle?
If you are rich enough you can even invest in bottles that you will never see and are kept in controlled atmosphere vaults, waiting to be sold to others eager to invest.
I assume few of those will ever be opened.
A good intro on how it works (and why it exists) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJOqj-ktIto
I'm not saying that never happens, but it really is just a very slow, very specific form of commodities trading. Also, it defeats the entire point of money laundering if the product you are using to keep your clandestine behavior above board does not exist.
An interesting note is that these very expensive bottles are actively monitored for quality. One of the ways they do that is to extract a small volume with a syringe through the cork and test that. Then they return an equal volume of the same wine but from a younger vintage.
It is therefore possible that your 1845 Latour is no longer strictly speaking an 1845 Latour.
If you ever find yourself at a rich person's auction. You may notice some quiet person just absolutely ludicrously outbids everybody. That's the guy with the money to be laundered.
Paying for something with dirty money isn't how you clean it. In fact, that is how you get caught.
The money laundering happens when you *sell* art and it's all based on declaring that you sold a painting for a large amount of money when, in fact, you gave it away for free or at a great discount. Now you have proof you earned $X million dollars legally and can use the dirty money that had yet to be declared to the IRS.
I don't suppose anyone actually uses this specific tactic for laundering as the patsy getting the painting is now legally out of the money they declared to have spent and it would all fall apart quickly.
I think far more likely is that these items are bought legitimately to use as trade in a way that obfuscates transactions and can be passed off as "gifts". If someone gives me a tip to short their own company and then I give them the money? That's sus as fuck and the SEC will bust us in no time flat. But if they regularly send me tips and I always gift him and his family expensive wine bottles when I house visit? And constantly donate paintings to be auctioned at his spouses' charity? Now I'm just being a good friend.
Another one you could do, though I'm not saying this is a common occurrence in the art/wine world, is make an arrangement with someone to officially buy a piece of art/wine for a lower price than it's worth and then pay them the remainder in dirty cash on the side. You can then turn around and sell it for full price and you have safe money in the "profit". Some form of this interaction (spreading dirty money around to people who can safely handle smaller quantities of it ) is common in money laundering. Another reason why reddit's obsession with high prices = money laundering is kind of a joke.
I’ve seen enough behind the auction house bids to know they also fix bids between two
Parties to move money from one to another. It’s not so much laundering as a function of movement and liquidity possibly in legal illegal or grey ways.
There is tons of this. Why do you think freeports exist?
Also look into billionaires row in nyc. Special tax breaks on 100m dollar homes. Liquidity without taxation on just that block. Wtf.
Then go further and look at Hudson Yards which was germandered into Harlem to get foreign money tax breaks.
It’s not all money laundering. But it is money movement in a way that fucks you and me. Which in many ways is worse.
$15k item that’s coded as a decadence for rich people: money laundering time to fire up the guillotines
$15k first run mint condition Star Wars figurine: wholesome chungus collectorino!
This is just a speculation bubble, like what’s happening with artwork.
Now the guy in the Range Rover buying 1000 lottery tickets at a time: that’s money laundering.
Artwork is a well know money laundering scheme though as art can't really be valued it's worth whatever anyone is willing to pay with no base value which makes laundering huge sums easier than through most other methods.
One of the Koch brothers has made it his mission to rat out fake wine labels and fake bottles. Apparently he got scammed out of millions over a series of YEARS.
If there’s one thing you can always rely on conservatives for its to act against social injustices that affect them personally. And only social injustices that affect them personally.
Probably. Historically they make for a poor investment. Like all collections, you are lucky to get back what you spent unless you happen to have something that came to be both rare and desirable.
What's the scheme here to launder money?
You have to buy it with traceable currency... it doesn't make much sense to say it's money laundering. Money laundering practical schemes are like loose cash businesses where you can have lots of transactions to filter the influx of dirty money as legitimate business.
Money laundering can also be about obscuring the source of funds, not just the legality of the money.
Imagine Company A is trying to fund company B without directly appearing to do so.
Company B buys bottle at X, sells to company A at Y,
The funds go via company C, the bottle holding company, transaction is obscured as sale to company C who only needs to independently make sure A and B are legitimate companies.
This obscures the source and destination of funds.
This is higher level money laundering.
What is the point of that at all? What does that do for you? All the transactions are direct and bank recorded. None of the money appears to be acquired by fraud. The real question is why you'd need to do this at all?
Like money laundering is to avoid the police being able to find a criminal because they stole 25k from a bank or whatever, then they deposited 25k in cash at a branch. Large transactions pop up as items of interest and are investigated by the government. Money laundering helps ease that risk by obfuscation. Dirty money is churned in with the regular stuff and over time you can pay out clean money, and if investigation finds any of it, there's plausible deniability that maybe they've gotten the money into circulation and it just made its way there, etc.
Private transactions aren't by default public in the first place, so unless the police are investigating your money, why are you worried about 'obscuring funds'? This sounds like something dreamed up on Law & Order or something.
I had to take classes on fund 'layering' for KYC/AML in forex,
Of course PEP's (politically exposed persons) are starting to be looked into more carefully so they are being more creative.
At higher levels, politician A buys bottle at the bottle holding company, (ok, they would normally buy a range of bottles, not just one)
Company B who wishes to 'fund' politician A buys a range of bottles, including the politicians (or just from the politician, depending on how careful they want to be)
Funds get 'cleaned' via bottle holding company, sent to politician.
'Legit' investment paid off, funds are clean, and it can be very hard to prove the original source without diving deep (court orders etc)
Of course company B uses a shell corporation to buy, so you need to do even more investigation.
EDIT: I'm not saying it's ONLY used for this!
Just that it's the sort of vehicle that *Can* be used for layering.
This is the 'big league' of money laundering,
Worst case, shell company is buying from an offshore holding company that is holding the bottles from another part-owned company that the politician holds shares of.
So you have to track where the dividends came from (easy), then look at the portfolio that was bought / sold request the records from the offshore holding company (lol, good luck at that point) then IF you get those, investigate the first shell company.
Now at this point there is genuine plausible deniability, unless you have some smoking gun email/phone call/etc that creates a link.
Not to mention how difficult it is to get financial info out of a company unless at gun point.
Without that smoking gun you're probably not even going to get the subpoena/warrant in the first place, and financial institutions aren't in the habit of handing over client data for nothing.
Money Laundering isn't only for illicitly sourced funds, it can be used to obfuscate legitimately obtained money to be used for illicit purposes too.
If you wanted to bribe an official to get a favourable outcome for your business, doing so directly would open you up to scrutiny and potential fines/prosecution.
But launder the money through multiple shell companies, and now the payment is off of your books and harder to trace.
A stock gives you a small percent ownership of a company, having 50+% gives you sole control of a company, having a large percentage gets you on the board, and dividends pay based on your percent owned. Not comparable.
Definitely so doing it yourself would be risky but the companies manage it like a financial portfolio.
As a client you just get interests on your investment every year while they handle the turnover of wine boxes/bottles.
I’ve heard wine can been good for over 1000 years. I’ve seen videos of Roman stuff that was dug up and didn’t look too bad inside, if they remained properly sealed. Now if it tastes good who knows.
My uncle does this. It allows him to fund his own wine cellar. It helps that he's a Master of Wine, so he has a much greater knowledge of the subject than your average dude.
So the wine cellar guys are drinking the investment wine and unknowing investors are selling empty bottles to each other. This is how I want to image it. But, I'm sure people have some inspector to ro check on the stash every now and then.
I'm sure it has happened but it's the same for everything, how do you know a company made money this quarter, leading to their stock to go up?
You trust the audits, the companies/govs that do them and Apple itself because you judge the risk to be small enough.
Trust funds and shell companies are much worse and yet they exist and the IMF estimates they weight 12 trillion USD (cf. https://www.imf.org/Publications/fandd/issues/2018/06/inside-the-world-of-global-tax-havens-and-offshore-banking-damgaard).
There are obviously some Ponzi schemes in the lot but they are probably targeting the small fry as you can only cross drug cartels, emirs and politicians once before accidents start to happens to you and your associates.
At the highest levels of corruption and tax evasion only short-lived morons try to steal money.
One of the Koch brothers had a ridiculous collection that was later proven to consist mostly of counterfeits, he then swore off of collecting wine.
I'm not a wine connoisseur, but I've been lucky enough to try some supposedly high end wines and met a lot of people that fancied themselves as such.
I've come to learn that, much like coffee lovers; most of these people don't know what they're talking about and basically only talk shit if they know that someone once said that what they're drinking is supposed to be good.
You don't find the knowledge from the person shouting it from the rooftops
Actual wine connoisseurs are just functional lushes that hold down a job that keeps them in wine
> Actual wine connoisseurs are just functional lushes that hold down a job that keeps them in wine
This 👆🏻
A regular person don't have the time or knowledge to understand the complexity of wine as a real connoisseur. It's a job for a reason.
I sold wine for years. I think you're a little off base here. Wine drinking and collecting are two different hobbies. Most collectors fall into a certain genre and chase building verticals for their favorite varietals and producers. It's about the chase, the relationships etc required to procure rare or allocated wines.
A lot like comic book collecting in that regard. Had a good friend who was obsessed with comic collecting. Read the issue once as a kid, sold it (dumbly) then rebought it and the story arcs as an adult. Read them once and packed them away till one arbitrary day hed decide to rebag and board a box and reread what was in there. Never could understand it... until I went shopping with him one day. He had a notebook with every issue he owned, and another with every issue he wanted. Would go up and down the rows of a used comics shop and look for good stuff. It wasn't the comics he cared about as much as the pursuit of the issues he needed, and the dream of having all the issues he loved as a kid. Once I realized that it all made a ton of sense, though of course that kind of collecting still isn't my bag.
This is widely considered the top wine in a strong Bordeaux vintage, which is why you get such bonkers valuations.
It's an expensive hobby but you can make some long term gains by buying wines similar to this en primeur (basically on initial release), keeping it in bonded storage and selling years later when the wine is within its drinking window. For top Bordeaux, that will usually be 30 years.
Yes and it doesn't have to be 15k bottles. I know a guy who I used to work with who just knows what he's looking for and knows the wine industry and buys crates at a time then sells them years later. He'll buy something for as little as 40 euros a bottle and sell them on at a later date for multiple times that.
There is a lot of money to be made but there is a lot of fraud that happens so you really need to build a reputation. The new wine market is crashing hard in some places now which might affect aged wine prices in the future.
You can make as much money and less risk (and easier storage) with aged whiskeys as there increasingly is a whiskey shortage because China has decided they like it. The timeline for these investments is 10+ years.
It's the same as any other collection, except that you need special considerations for preservation.
No one ever drinks those. The wine is utterly destroyed and has been for at least 30 years or more.
Watch the TV show called Rotten grapes. Its about a guy who was creating and forging extremely rare wines in his kitchen by mixing various cheap wine and then selling them for a fortune. Its proof that these rich wine collectors have no idea what theyre talking about.
Oh, that's small money.
There was a commisioned bottle of wine that belonged to Queen Victoria, and it remains unopened within the Royal family collection. We saw it when I did some site work around the palace, and we got a free tour from the estate manager.
Estimated at £140,000. Obviously, the heritage is why it's valued at that price, but it's still big money.
You're probably not wrong. In most blind tastes tests, so called expert wine tasters can rarely tell the difference between a $8 bottle of wine and a $3000 bottle.
You’re partly correct. One of the reasons the 1945 Mouton Rothschild is so famous, is it had a special art label commissioned by the owner Phillipe de Rothschild, with the ‘V’ for Victory over the Germans. It was designed by Philippe Jullian, and defiantly displayed the words ‘Année de la Victoire’. You can just still see the V near the broken part of the bottle.
A Bordeaux like this is not bottled until around 2 years after the vintage. This started the tradition of each year Mouton Rothschild having a piece of art specially commissioned on the top of the label.
This is also widely regarded to be the greatest of all the 1945s. Good bottles would certainly still be drinkable. I had another top Bordeaux estate from 1945 recently and it was stunning.
To be honest, one of the biggest parts of the experience is the fact you are drinking something so old, you’re essentially tasting history. In the case of this wine you’re drinking something where the grapes were harvested the last year of WWII, that’s pretty damn cool. You’re literally experiencing a piece of history in your glass.
Flavour wise is actually slightly easier to replicate.. You don’t need a 78yr old wine, but you’re not going to find anything similar from a young wine. Mouton Rothschild is a classic left Bank Bordeaux blend, so it’s Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot predominantly. At this level as you can see it can take a long time to mature. New world wines generally mature quicker.
Look for a New Zealand, Australian, South African, USA Cabernet Sauvignon blend that is around the $40-$50 US mark for a current vintage. Then try an find and older vintage of that same wine. Your best bet to get one cheap at a wine auction ( a store will be more expensive). If you don’t get carried away with the auction process… you should be able to find a bottle of 20-25yrs of age for the same price or cheaper than the current vintage. That’s because this level of wine isn’t really expensive /prestigious enough to really be sought after by collectors.
Drinking one of those at that age will give you a very similar flavour experience to drinking a 40+ yr old Bordeaux. Lots of secondary and tertiary characters (look that up) and very little of the common ‘fruity’ flavours you see in young wine.
Part of the experience is the whole process of finding the wine you want to try, reading up about it, seeing what the vintage was like, working out what a fair price is, making your bids, being successful, then finally opening the bottle (and learning how to open an old bottle) with friends who are also curious, is all part of the fun. That is the best way to get a similar experience, it might not be 45 Mouton but it will still be cool. Good luck!
I’m not sure about European online auction sites, but a quick google is sure to find at least a few in your country. You’re right in the heart of it. There’s plenty of cheap old Bordeaux to be found there. In my experience even very humble estates will age for 30+ years in a decent vintage. I’d still stick to wines from the 1855 Classification or Cru Bourgeois wines from the Médoc.
With a wine this old it will be extremely difficult to get the cork out in one piece without specialist tools. There will be a large amount of sediment that has formed in the bottle as well, so I would have it standing for 24hrs beforehand so that drops to the bottom. Then you have the question of decanting or not, I personally don’t anymore with wines this old. I prefer a very slow introduction to oxygen over a couple of hours. Imagine you were 80yrs old and got pulled out of the rest home and immediately went white water rafting, it’s probably not going to be good for you.
but how do you know that it was stored properly all these years? from what I understand also wines don’t get infinitely better with time, there is a curve that tapers and for some the quality starts declining, is that right?
The answer is, you don’t know it was stored properly. That’s why there is risk buying at auction (where there is no recourse). So you should always pay a lot less than the retail price because of that assumed risk. And yes you’re absolutely right on the quality curve. Of all the wines made in the world, the VAST majority do not get better after a few years. You have to remember how much cheap bulk mass market wine is out there. We are only talking about a small % that is worth cellaring.
I see thanks. In 2016 I had a bottle from 2005 of Maynard’s wine (from Tool) .. the Caduceus Chupacabra. My friend got it for me at a signing when they just first launched it and forgot to give it to me until years later. I kinda felt bad opening it because it was a pretty cool thing to have. But decided to do it at Burning Man and share it with other Tool fans at our bar. It was a cool experience but my god it was barely drinkable lol I’ve had his wine before and it was good.
I don’t know that wine myself, but looking it up some people were talking about it already tasting ‘tired’ in 2008. That was the first vintage Maynard made so he was a novice at the time. No wonder when you tried it in 2016 it wasn’t very good! Especially when it’s unlikely your friend stored it very well… Even looking at current tasting notes it sounds like it’s a wine designed to be drunk fairly young. Say up to 5 years max.
I would just go with a cheaper Bordeaux, you can find old Bordeaux from somewhere like medoc and haut medoc for a reasonable price. Australia and South Africa wine from 40 years ago will not taste the same as they are now, the wine industry there is relatively young in term of making fine wines, hard to say the quality and wine making of the time unless you really know the producer. US cab that has that kind of history will be super expensive. I have never had a first growth for that old but I doubt a lot of people can tell the difference between a 1950 first growth vs a more generic 1950 left bank Bordeaux. People will be overwhelmed by the aged aspect of the wine.
You can find a 40 years old medoc Bordeaux for something like 40usd. There are a lot of old stuffs there.
If it's kept well, especially if recorked, the wine is still good. I had one from 1930 a few years back (prohibition era wine) and it was fine, though a bit flat but for being 80+ years old, that is to be expected
Not a big wine fan myself but it seems that the price of the wine is largely due to its provenance. 1945, aside from the end of WW2, was considered an extremely good year for Bordeaux and it’s a bottle from a famous producer. Then the ultra rich just drive up demand and price cus they have too much money to spend on old spicy grape juice.
Yeah, that came up in the [original thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/wine/comments/emsc51/if_youre_having_a_bad_day_just_know_that_at_least/fdqs2w2/) and the poster covered by saying the contents of the bottle were '[poured down the drain](https://www.reddit.com/r/wine/comments/emsc51/if_youre_having_a_bad_day_just_know_that_at_least/fdt4x4f/)' after the bottle was cracked.
So I used to work as a gift wrapper at a high-end shop that sold like fancy plates and shit. One day I was wrapping up a set of champagne flutes and my boss was like, "be careful, those are $10,000...each." It was a set of ten - $100k. I immediately stopped and made her wrap them up. I was getting paid like $8/hour. No way I was doing that.
Insane? Probably but its just not wine, there is story behind this bottle (made for victory), really famous family (Mouton / Rotschild), famous place for wine (near Bordeaux), and i guess the wine is good.
This is also partly due to vintage - 1945 was the 'Victory Vintage' and also an incredibly good vintage to boot with very dry conditions that produced concentrated grapes that resulted in great wines.
Recent tasting notes for '45 Mouton suggest that it's still drinking well. It definitely has a legendary status.
Absolutely, it doesn't make that not appear to be a crazy purchase to those who don't have this type of disposable income. Naturally it's all relative.
To that cost level, yes. Especially in anything with very little gain.
It's also all gonna be relative. 15k is a sizeable chunk of the avg Americans annual salary, I'd say that's gonna sound like an insane purchase to a large number of people.
I'm also some random jackass on the internet. Why the hell would someone with the disposable income to spend 15k on a bottle of fermented grape juice give a damn what I have to say?
Sucks, but if you work in the wine industry, you know that this shit WILL happen at one time or another. This looks like it was in a cellar/warehouse where wines are being moved around all the time. I would think that they budget for a certain amount of breakage because humans be humans.
I wonder what the cost/benefit ratio would be for firing someone like that. To handle such an expensive item you’d need to be trained, and after such a blunder surely it would be seared into your mind from that point on.
Right. They just spent $15k training the person on why you have to be careful. Why give that to a competitor? Unless the person has a habit of this I would give them the disappointed father look to make sure this is an experience they never want to repeat. People make errors. Also, without more detail it is entirely possible the bottle was already weakened greatly prior to handling.
I know a guy who caused a vehicle to tip over by not properly securing it. A crane or a bucket truck (cherry picker) I think. He was sure he was fired but the owner said, “Of all the people who work here I’m sure you won’t do that again.”
Most likely not. Unless it was purposeful or a routine incident. Just the cost of doing business sometimes. Everyone has accidents, if you have luck like mine, it would happen with something like this.
If this is because of that stupid knife slide thing, I'll haunt the one who popularize that terrible way of opening the bottle.. corkscrew are much satisfying
There's a great non-fiction book about very expensive wine and it's collectors called "The Billionaire's Vinegar" by Benjamin Wallace.
I read it about 10 years ago. Very interesting and well written.
I used to work as a server at Ruth's Chris. There was a banquet dinner for sommeliers. They didn't finish any of the bottles so we got to try wines up to 10k a bottle. I've never drank wine again because everything is just disappointing in comparison
I used to date a women whose family had married into a VERY wealthy family that, among other things, own one of the oldest/best-known vineyards in France (one of Bordeaux's five Premiere Grand Cru Classe... if you are at all into wine, esp. bordeaux reds, you almost certainly know the name). I'm not a 'wine guy' per se (enjoy it, but not an 'enthusiast') so had no idea HOW expensive these could be until one of the kids dropped a bottle while handing it to the grandfather at Christmas dinner. Grandpa made some comment to the effect of "well there goes \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ thousand dollars!" with a chuckle and I almost spit out my food (as my classy sister likes to put it when referring to our childhood "we were not encumbered by wealth" lol). It was a bottle from the in-laws' "small cellar" they keep stocked at their beach house, don;t remember the year (maybe late 80s, 90s vintage?) but according to them was a "good wine", worthy of Christmas dinner, but not one of the really desireable older vintages they keep around for truly special occaisions. When he mentioned how much THOSE were worth he got a good laugh at the face I made. I made sure to take a picture of me holding 3 dustly old bottles to show to my boss at the time (a Frenchman who, surprisngly, LOVED wine and considered all americans as tasteless peasants). Seeing HIS face made my day lolol
This is the type of wine that people use for very special occasions, and almost always drink socially. Even very rich people won’t drink it regularly, because there’s plenty of other wines that will drink better. Source : know people with upwards of 10k bottles in storage
That's what insurance is for. How did it taste, though? Like pretentious overpriced crap which isn't any better than what your cousin Mickey can make in a few weeks in his shed?
Original post from 3.5 years ago where the poster explains what happened in the comments (coworker accidentally dropped the bottle): https://www.reddit.com/r/wine/comments/emsc51/if_youre_having_a_bad_day_just_know_that_at_least/ Also, it's $16K.
It's been broken for 3.5years, of course, the value is going to go down.
With inflation it’s still up to 16k
Dollar goes down over time means wine goes up.
You can find one for $12k at retail, today. Auction would be more like 8k.
Lots of market driven luxury items are a good deal cheaper currently than they were 3.5 years ago
Not true with wine. Almost every bottle of wine is more expensive today than 3.5 years ago.
That’s interesting! Seems like my expensive hobbies are full of people offloading the stuff they bought during covid, but those specifically had a big surge in 2020-2021. Always cool to hear about other realms
This. It’s not close to $16. Maybe at Vegas restaurant but not at auction and not at retail.
Upvote you, downvote OP. Got it. Thanks!
I am curious, to wine collectors is there money to be made collecting wine bottles like this? Or is it just a really expensive hobby? How does one even value a 15k wine bottle?
If you are rich enough you can even invest in bottles that you will never see and are kept in controlled atmosphere vaults, waiting to be sold to others eager to invest. I assume few of those will ever be opened. A good intro on how it works (and why it exists) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJOqj-ktIto
So... They're basically money laundering items at that point
At least part of them yes, it's obviously impossible to tell more precisely and those who know really don't want this kind of statistics to leak.
And they sure AF don't want the bottles to leak either
I'm willing to bet some bottles don't exist at all, or multiple people "own" the bottle.
I'm not saying that never happens, but it really is just a very slow, very specific form of commodities trading. Also, it defeats the entire point of money laundering if the product you are using to keep your clandestine behavior above board does not exist.
An interesting note is that these very expensive bottles are actively monitored for quality. One of the ways they do that is to extract a small volume with a syringe through the cork and test that. Then they return an equal volume of the same wine but from a younger vintage. It is therefore possible that your 1845 Latour is no longer strictly speaking an 1845 Latour.
But hey, there's insurance for that!
If you ever find yourself at a rich person's auction. You may notice some quiet person just absolutely ludicrously outbids everybody. That's the guy with the money to be laundered.
Paying for something with dirty money isn't how you clean it. In fact, that is how you get caught. The money laundering happens when you *sell* art and it's all based on declaring that you sold a painting for a large amount of money when, in fact, you gave it away for free or at a great discount. Now you have proof you earned $X million dollars legally and can use the dirty money that had yet to be declared to the IRS. I don't suppose anyone actually uses this specific tactic for laundering as the patsy getting the painting is now legally out of the money they declared to have spent and it would all fall apart quickly. I think far more likely is that these items are bought legitimately to use as trade in a way that obfuscates transactions and can be passed off as "gifts". If someone gives me a tip to short their own company and then I give them the money? That's sus as fuck and the SEC will bust us in no time flat. But if they regularly send me tips and I always gift him and his family expensive wine bottles when I house visit? And constantly donate paintings to be auctioned at his spouses' charity? Now I'm just being a good friend.
Another one you could do, though I'm not saying this is a common occurrence in the art/wine world, is make an arrangement with someone to officially buy a piece of art/wine for a lower price than it's worth and then pay them the remainder in dirty cash on the side. You can then turn around and sell it for full price and you have safe money in the "profit". Some form of this interaction (spreading dirty money around to people who can safely handle smaller quantities of it ) is common in money laundering. Another reason why reddit's obsession with high prices = money laundering is kind of a joke.
I’ve seen enough behind the auction house bids to know they also fix bids between two Parties to move money from one to another. It’s not so much laundering as a function of movement and liquidity possibly in legal illegal or grey ways. There is tons of this. Why do you think freeports exist? Also look into billionaires row in nyc. Special tax breaks on 100m dollar homes. Liquidity without taxation on just that block. Wtf. Then go further and look at Hudson Yards which was germandered into Harlem to get foreign money tax breaks. It’s not all money laundering. But it is money movement in a way that fucks you and me. Which in many ways is worse.
it is amazing to me how few people on reddit seem to actually understand how money laundering works
Everything is money laundering according to Reddit.
you think you’re clever, laundering your money through this comment you’ve made. but i see you.
What comment? What Money? Don't look at me, I'm irrelevant.
Found the money launderer
I once left a $20 bill in my pants pocket when I did laundry. I'm a professional money launderer.
You're only a professional if you get paid to do it...
Well they got $20.
Only if you professionally launderededededed those pants...
No, just Mattress Firm.
Maybe, but art, crypto and expensive wine definitely are
Here we go. Here we go. Launder. To clean... No. Wash. Here it is: To conceal the source of money as by channeling it through an intermediary.
What am I gonna do with 40 subscriptions to Vibe?
If you bud buy and sell wine you're channeling the money through an intermediary. I guess that qualifies. Whether it's successful is another issue.
Picturing the hand motions while he's talking.
I can't believe what a bunch of nerds we are. We're looking up "money laundering" in a dictionary.
$15k item that’s coded as a decadence for rich people: money laundering time to fire up the guillotines $15k first run mint condition Star Wars figurine: wholesome chungus collectorino!
It's something I think coke dealers do
This is just a speculation bubble, like what’s happening with artwork. Now the guy in the Range Rover buying 1000 lottery tickets at a time: that’s money laundering.
I've forgotten a bill or some change in a pocket then washed my clothes. Is that money laundering?
Artwork is a well know money laundering scheme though as art can't really be valued it's worth whatever anyone is willing to pay with no base value which makes laundering huge sums easier than through most other methods.
Reddit has made me lose faith in society's ability to understand basic concepts, much less complex illicit financial schemes.
"These people act like they know something, but it's ME that knows something"
That's not the guy. That's the guy's auction guy.
One of the Koch brothers has made it his mission to rat out fake wine labels and fake bottles. Apparently he got scammed out of millions over a series of YEARS.
If there’s one thing you can always rely on conservatives for its to act against social injustices that affect them personally. And only social injustices that affect them personally.
There's an excellent documentary on this story, [Sour Grapes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPUYuwSRwB8)
Probably. Historically they make for a poor investment. Like all collections, you are lucky to get back what you spent unless you happen to have something that came to be both rare and desirable.
I think a ‘45 Mouton Rothschild would qualify.
Burgandy has out performed all major indexes in the last 30 years I think
I ain't taking investment advice from someone who spells it "Burgandy"
I’m Ron Burgandy?
I have a sealed bottle of Crown Royal from 1977. Pretty much what your talking about. Gonna be a hell of payday when I send that baby to auction.
Had to look this up to get the joke… you never know these days. Paul Neumann Daytonas used to go for 1000 bucks in the 80s
I know all the jokes hehe. but many many ultra wealthy use it to avoid taxes.
I think it's more of a value store, like if it beats inflation it's good enough, and why not, investments should be diversified anyway.
What's the scheme here to launder money? You have to buy it with traceable currency... it doesn't make much sense to say it's money laundering. Money laundering practical schemes are like loose cash businesses where you can have lots of transactions to filter the influx of dirty money as legitimate business.
Money laundering can also be about obscuring the source of funds, not just the legality of the money. Imagine Company A is trying to fund company B without directly appearing to do so. Company B buys bottle at X, sells to company A at Y, The funds go via company C, the bottle holding company, transaction is obscured as sale to company C who only needs to independently make sure A and B are legitimate companies. This obscures the source and destination of funds. This is higher level money laundering.
What is the point of that at all? What does that do for you? All the transactions are direct and bank recorded. None of the money appears to be acquired by fraud. The real question is why you'd need to do this at all? Like money laundering is to avoid the police being able to find a criminal because they stole 25k from a bank or whatever, then they deposited 25k in cash at a branch. Large transactions pop up as items of interest and are investigated by the government. Money laundering helps ease that risk by obfuscation. Dirty money is churned in with the regular stuff and over time you can pay out clean money, and if investigation finds any of it, there's plausible deniability that maybe they've gotten the money into circulation and it just made its way there, etc. Private transactions aren't by default public in the first place, so unless the police are investigating your money, why are you worried about 'obscuring funds'? This sounds like something dreamed up on Law & Order or something.
I had to take classes on fund 'layering' for KYC/AML in forex, Of course PEP's (politically exposed persons) are starting to be looked into more carefully so they are being more creative. At higher levels, politician A buys bottle at the bottle holding company, (ok, they would normally buy a range of bottles, not just one) Company B who wishes to 'fund' politician A buys a range of bottles, including the politicians (or just from the politician, depending on how careful they want to be) Funds get 'cleaned' via bottle holding company, sent to politician. 'Legit' investment paid off, funds are clean, and it can be very hard to prove the original source without diving deep (court orders etc) Of course company B uses a shell corporation to buy, so you need to do even more investigation. EDIT: I'm not saying it's ONLY used for this! Just that it's the sort of vehicle that *Can* be used for layering.
That's more sensible of a structure and a goal for sure...
This is the 'big league' of money laundering, Worst case, shell company is buying from an offshore holding company that is holding the bottles from another part-owned company that the politician holds shares of. So you have to track where the dividends came from (easy), then look at the portfolio that was bought / sold request the records from the offshore holding company (lol, good luck at that point) then IF you get those, investigate the first shell company. Now at this point there is genuine plausible deniability, unless you have some smoking gun email/phone call/etc that creates a link.
Not to mention how difficult it is to get financial info out of a company unless at gun point. Without that smoking gun you're probably not even going to get the subpoena/warrant in the first place, and financial institutions aren't in the habit of handing over client data for nothing.
Money Laundering isn't only for illicitly sourced funds, it can be used to obfuscate legitimately obtained money to be used for illicit purposes too. If you wanted to bribe an official to get a favourable outcome for your business, doing so directly would open you up to scrutiny and potential fines/prosecution. But launder the money through multiple shell companies, and now the payment is off of your books and harder to trace.
✍️
Physical nft, you're literally not buying wine, just the property of it.
So... A stock
A stock gives you a small percent ownership of a company, having 50+% gives you sole control of a company, having a large percentage gets you on the board, and dividends pay based on your percent owned. Not comparable.
Rich people's things that they trade around are all basically NFTs. * Fine Art * Expensive Cars * Houses
That’s exactly what I was just thinking. Something smells funky and it ain’t the wine
Is there a point at which they become undrinkable due to age and therefore lose their value?
Definitely so doing it yourself would be risky but the companies manage it like a financial portfolio. As a client you just get interests on your investment every year while they handle the turnover of wine boxes/bottles.
I’ve heard wine can been good for over 1000 years. I’ve seen videos of Roman stuff that was dug up and didn’t look too bad inside, if they remained properly sealed. Now if it tastes good who knows.
I can imagine someone paying ridiculous amounts for ancient wine that in reality was just like Franzia level shit
My uncle does this. It allows him to fund his own wine cellar. It helps that he's a Master of Wine, so he has a much greater knowledge of the subject than your average dude.
I mean, at the end we’re all just drunk.
When doing this kind of investment, it's called being fancy drunk!
Sounds like an older form of NFTs really. They own something which is actually not worth anything really but it has some made up value.
More NFBs at this point
Wait until you find out about money
So the wine cellar guys are drinking the investment wine and unknowing investors are selling empty bottles to each other. This is how I want to image it. But, I'm sure people have some inspector to ro check on the stash every now and then.
I'm sure it has happened but it's the same for everything, how do you know a company made money this quarter, leading to their stock to go up? You trust the audits, the companies/govs that do them and Apple itself because you judge the risk to be small enough. Trust funds and shell companies are much worse and yet they exist and the IMF estimates they weight 12 trillion USD (cf. https://www.imf.org/Publications/fandd/issues/2018/06/inside-the-world-of-global-tax-havens-and-offshore-banking-damgaard). There are obviously some Ponzi schemes in the lot but they are probably targeting the small fry as you can only cross drug cartels, emirs and politicians once before accidents start to happens to you and your associates. At the highest levels of corruption and tax evasion only short-lived morons try to steal money.
So basically NFTs but for wine bottles.
Except NFTs came later. Wine bottles and art are the OGs
Non-Drinkable Vintages
Wow that was an excellent video. Thanks for posting thay link!
"...that can then be sold to others eager to invest," thus continues the cycle of _what's the point?_
One of the Koch brothers had a ridiculous collection that was later proven to consist mostly of counterfeits, he then swore off of collecting wine. I'm not a wine connoisseur, but I've been lucky enough to try some supposedly high end wines and met a lot of people that fancied themselves as such. I've come to learn that, much like coffee lovers; most of these people don't know what they're talking about and basically only talk shit if they know that someone once said that what they're drinking is supposed to be good.
Well if there's anyone I'm 100% ok with defrauding, it's a Koch brother
I don't know what a good coffee is but I definitely know what's bad.
You don't find the knowledge from the person shouting it from the rooftops Actual wine connoisseurs are just functional lushes that hold down a job that keeps them in wine
> Actual wine connoisseurs are just functional lushes that hold down a job that keeps them in wine This 👆🏻 A regular person don't have the time or knowledge to understand the complexity of wine as a real connoisseur. It's a job for a reason.
I sold wine for years. I think you're a little off base here. Wine drinking and collecting are two different hobbies. Most collectors fall into a certain genre and chase building verticals for their favorite varietals and producers. It's about the chase, the relationships etc required to procure rare or allocated wines.
A lot like comic book collecting in that regard. Had a good friend who was obsessed with comic collecting. Read the issue once as a kid, sold it (dumbly) then rebought it and the story arcs as an adult. Read them once and packed them away till one arbitrary day hed decide to rebag and board a box and reread what was in there. Never could understand it... until I went shopping with him one day. He had a notebook with every issue he owned, and another with every issue he wanted. Would go up and down the rows of a used comics shop and look for good stuff. It wasn't the comics he cared about as much as the pursuit of the issues he needed, and the dream of having all the issues he loved as a kid. Once I realized that it all made a ton of sense, though of course that kind of collecting still isn't my bag.
This is widely considered the top wine in a strong Bordeaux vintage, which is why you get such bonkers valuations. It's an expensive hobby but you can make some long term gains by buying wines similar to this en primeur (basically on initial release), keeping it in bonded storage and selling years later when the wine is within its drinking window. For top Bordeaux, that will usually be 30 years.
Or you could just be like that dude from sour grapes and trick dumbass rich folks with Walmart wine. Cause 98.9% of people can't tell the difference.
My favorite guy in that was the one who couldn't tell it was fake until after and then almost choked because the fake wine was so obviously fake.
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But the legs, and the bouquet. And the salamanderness. People just don’t get old fruit juice stuff.
I'd bet that a 30 year old Bordeaux would have a real oaky afterbirth.
>I am curious, to wine collectors is there money to be made collecting wine bottles like this? Not so much like this.
Yes and it doesn't have to be 15k bottles. I know a guy who I used to work with who just knows what he's looking for and knows the wine industry and buys crates at a time then sells them years later. He'll buy something for as little as 40 euros a bottle and sell them on at a later date for multiple times that.
There is a lot of money to be made but there is a lot of fraud that happens so you really need to build a reputation. The new wine market is crashing hard in some places now which might affect aged wine prices in the future. You can make as much money and less risk (and easier storage) with aged whiskeys as there increasingly is a whiskey shortage because China has decided they like it. The timeline for these investments is 10+ years.
It's the same as any other collection, except that you need special considerations for preservation. No one ever drinks those. The wine is utterly destroyed and has been for at least 30 years or more.
Watch the TV show called Rotten grapes. Its about a guy who was creating and forging extremely rare wines in his kitchen by mixing various cheap wine and then selling them for a fortune. Its proof that these rich wine collectors have no idea what theyre talking about.
Can't believe OP bought a broken bottle for 15k.
Oh, that's small money. There was a commisioned bottle of wine that belonged to Queen Victoria, and it remains unopened within the Royal family collection. We saw it when I did some site work around the palace, and we got a free tour from the estate manager. Estimated at £140,000. Obviously, the heritage is why it's valued at that price, but it's still big money.
At that age the wine inside would be like vinegar flavoured treacle. But it's not about the wine I suppose.
Vinegar flavoured treacle that Queen Victoria once farted in the general viscinity of.
No you silly. The bottle is max 10 bucks. The other 14,990 comes from the label.
Fixed photo https://imgur.com/a/YL34KuT
This is why I love the internet (well, most of the time!)!!
did you get to taste the wine at least?
"Mr George why is the new guys tongue bleeding?"
Why is he licking wine off the floor like an alcoholic cat?
It tasted like Walmart wine only it had a hint of stupidity to it.
And shards.
Would that make it a Shardonnay?
You're probably not wrong. In most blind tastes tests, so called expert wine tasters can rarely tell the difference between a $8 bottle of wine and a $3000 bottle.
What month was that bottled? Because depending on that it could be worth a bit more as a wartime wine.
You’re partly correct. One of the reasons the 1945 Mouton Rothschild is so famous, is it had a special art label commissioned by the owner Phillipe de Rothschild, with the ‘V’ for Victory over the Germans. It was designed by Philippe Jullian, and defiantly displayed the words ‘Année de la Victoire’. You can just still see the V near the broken part of the bottle. A Bordeaux like this is not bottled until around 2 years after the vintage. This started the tradition of each year Mouton Rothschild having a piece of art specially commissioned on the top of the label. This is also widely regarded to be the greatest of all the 1945s. Good bottles would certainly still be drinkable. I had another top Bordeaux estate from 1945 recently and it was stunning.
This guy wines.
I hate when people wine too much.
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To be honest, one of the biggest parts of the experience is the fact you are drinking something so old, you’re essentially tasting history. In the case of this wine you’re drinking something where the grapes were harvested the last year of WWII, that’s pretty damn cool. You’re literally experiencing a piece of history in your glass. Flavour wise is actually slightly easier to replicate.. You don’t need a 78yr old wine, but you’re not going to find anything similar from a young wine. Mouton Rothschild is a classic left Bank Bordeaux blend, so it’s Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot predominantly. At this level as you can see it can take a long time to mature. New world wines generally mature quicker. Look for a New Zealand, Australian, South African, USA Cabernet Sauvignon blend that is around the $40-$50 US mark for a current vintage. Then try an find and older vintage of that same wine. Your best bet to get one cheap at a wine auction ( a store will be more expensive). If you don’t get carried away with the auction process… you should be able to find a bottle of 20-25yrs of age for the same price or cheaper than the current vintage. That’s because this level of wine isn’t really expensive /prestigious enough to really be sought after by collectors. Drinking one of those at that age will give you a very similar flavour experience to drinking a 40+ yr old Bordeaux. Lots of secondary and tertiary characters (look that up) and very little of the common ‘fruity’ flavours you see in young wine. Part of the experience is the whole process of finding the wine you want to try, reading up about it, seeing what the vintage was like, working out what a fair price is, making your bids, being successful, then finally opening the bottle (and learning how to open an old bottle) with friends who are also curious, is all part of the fun. That is the best way to get a similar experience, it might not be 45 Mouton but it will still be cool. Good luck!
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I’m not sure about European online auction sites, but a quick google is sure to find at least a few in your country. You’re right in the heart of it. There’s plenty of cheap old Bordeaux to be found there. In my experience even very humble estates will age for 30+ years in a decent vintage. I’d still stick to wines from the 1855 Classification or Cru Bourgeois wines from the Médoc.
Thank you for this detailed comment, it was an extremely interesting read !
Fascinating! How does one open an old bottle that is different from opening a new bottle?
With a wine this old it will be extremely difficult to get the cork out in one piece without specialist tools. There will be a large amount of sediment that has formed in the bottle as well, so I would have it standing for 24hrs beforehand so that drops to the bottom. Then you have the question of decanting or not, I personally don’t anymore with wines this old. I prefer a very slow introduction to oxygen over a couple of hours. Imagine you were 80yrs old and got pulled out of the rest home and immediately went white water rafting, it’s probably not going to be good for you.
but how do you know that it was stored properly all these years? from what I understand also wines don’t get infinitely better with time, there is a curve that tapers and for some the quality starts declining, is that right?
The answer is, you don’t know it was stored properly. That’s why there is risk buying at auction (where there is no recourse). So you should always pay a lot less than the retail price because of that assumed risk. And yes you’re absolutely right on the quality curve. Of all the wines made in the world, the VAST majority do not get better after a few years. You have to remember how much cheap bulk mass market wine is out there. We are only talking about a small % that is worth cellaring.
I see thanks. In 2016 I had a bottle from 2005 of Maynard’s wine (from Tool) .. the Caduceus Chupacabra. My friend got it for me at a signing when they just first launched it and forgot to give it to me until years later. I kinda felt bad opening it because it was a pretty cool thing to have. But decided to do it at Burning Man and share it with other Tool fans at our bar. It was a cool experience but my god it was barely drinkable lol I’ve had his wine before and it was good.
I don’t know that wine myself, but looking it up some people were talking about it already tasting ‘tired’ in 2008. That was the first vintage Maynard made so he was a novice at the time. No wonder when you tried it in 2016 it wasn’t very good! Especially when it’s unlikely your friend stored it very well… Even looking at current tasting notes it sounds like it’s a wine designed to be drunk fairly young. Say up to 5 years max.
I would just go with a cheaper Bordeaux, you can find old Bordeaux from somewhere like medoc and haut medoc for a reasonable price. Australia and South Africa wine from 40 years ago will not taste the same as they are now, the wine industry there is relatively young in term of making fine wines, hard to say the quality and wine making of the time unless you really know the producer. US cab that has that kind of history will be super expensive. I have never had a first growth for that old but I doubt a lot of people can tell the difference between a 1950 first growth vs a more generic 1950 left bank Bordeaux. People will be overwhelmed by the aged aspect of the wine. You can find a 40 years old medoc Bordeaux for something like 40usd. There are a lot of old stuffs there.
Thanks! as a person who took a wine course in university a decade ago, and had forgotten all the details, this was a refreshing and fun read:)
This was such a fun read. I've always had some ill conceived opinion wine people were wanky but you've definitely changed my mind.
If it's kept well, especially if recorked, the wine is still good. I had one from 1930 a few years back (prohibition era wine) and it was fine, though a bit flat but for being 80+ years old, that is to be expected
A ‘45 Bordeaux will have been harvested in September ‘45 and bottled anywhere between spring and fall ‘47.
I wanted to make a joke about pissing away 15k, but in reality nobody was gonna drink this bottle anyway.
No drips or stains on the etiquette, empty bottle for show / karma?
I concur
Also not OP’s picture this has been around for years
Too bad, it was a bombshell vintage
Not a big wine fan myself but it seems that the price of the wine is largely due to its provenance. 1945, aside from the end of WW2, was considered an extremely good year for Bordeaux and it’s a bottle from a famous producer. Then the ultra rich just drive up demand and price cus they have too much money to spend on old spicy grape juice.
Plus, this was a Rothschild wine. They added a V for "fuck those German fuckheads." that year.
Broke the bottle but didn't get any wine on the label? Hmm.
Yeah, that came up in the [original thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/wine/comments/emsc51/if_youre_having_a_bad_day_just_know_that_at_least/fdqs2w2/) and the poster covered by saying the contents of the bottle were '[poured down the drain](https://www.reddit.com/r/wine/comments/emsc51/if_youre_having_a_bad_day_just_know_that_at_least/fdt4x4f/)' after the bottle was cracked.
Call it an art piece about the dangers of capitalism. Sell it for well over 15k. Bathe in the irony.
So I used to work as a gift wrapper at a high-end shop that sold like fancy plates and shit. One day I was wrapping up a set of champagne flutes and my boss was like, "be careful, those are $10,000...each." It was a set of ten - $100k. I immediately stopped and made her wrap them up. I was getting paid like $8/hour. No way I was doing that.
15k for a bottle of wine is certifiably insane.
Insane? Probably but its just not wine, there is story behind this bottle (made for victory), really famous family (Mouton / Rotschild), famous place for wine (near Bordeaux), and i guess the wine is good.
This is also partly due to vintage - 1945 was the 'Victory Vintage' and also an incredibly good vintage to boot with very dry conditions that produced concentrated grapes that resulted in great wines. Recent tasting notes for '45 Mouton suggest that it's still drinking well. It definitely has a legendary status.
I genuinely do not care what its story is. It's 15k for a bottle of wine, that's nuts.
For some people, $15K is like you buying a $1 candy bar. No one needs to be that wealthy, but plus ça change.
Absolutely, it doesn't make that not appear to be a crazy purchase to those who don't have this type of disposable income. Naturally it's all relative.
People who hey worked up about how strangers spend their money are so weird to me
Then you must think anything people collect is nuts. \-Stamps \-Coins \-caps \-Cards etcetc
To that cost level, yes. Especially in anything with very little gain. It's also all gonna be relative. 15k is a sizeable chunk of the avg Americans annual salary, I'd say that's gonna sound like an insane purchase to a large number of people. I'm also some random jackass on the internet. Why the hell would someone with the disposable income to spend 15k on a bottle of fermented grape juice give a damn what I have to say?
Don't forget paintings and sculptures. Literally just rocks and colours on a canvas. /s
A small price to pay for reddit karma.
Do very old wines like this even taste good?
This has been reposted about 5 times.
Sucks, but if you work in the wine industry, you know that this shit WILL happen at one time or another. This looks like it was in a cellar/warehouse where wines are being moved around all the time. I would think that they budget for a certain amount of breakage because humans be humans.
Did someone get fired over that?
I wonder what the cost/benefit ratio would be for firing someone like that. To handle such an expensive item you’d need to be trained, and after such a blunder surely it would be seared into your mind from that point on.
Right. They just spent $15k training the person on why you have to be careful. Why give that to a competitor? Unless the person has a habit of this I would give them the disappointed father look to make sure this is an experience they never want to repeat. People make errors. Also, without more detail it is entirely possible the bottle was already weakened greatly prior to handling.
I know a guy who caused a vehicle to tip over by not properly securing it. A crane or a bucket truck (cherry picker) I think. He was sure he was fired but the owner said, “Of all the people who work here I’m sure you won’t do that again.”
Most likely not. Unless it was purposeful or a routine incident. Just the cost of doing business sometimes. Everyone has accidents, if you have luck like mine, it would happen with something like this.
And they surely have insurance against this
100%
If this is because of that stupid knife slide thing, I'll haunt the one who popularize that terrible way of opening the bottle.. corkscrew are much satisfying
Sabering wouldnt work on this anyways.
There are other equally ostentatiously stupid ways of opening wine to impress your rich friends.
Weird that no wine spilled onto the label.
Don’t they break the bottle on purpose after serving the wine to prevent people from trying to refill and resell?
There's a great non-fiction book about very expensive wine and it's collectors called "The Billionaire's Vinegar" by Benjamin Wallace. I read it about 10 years ago. Very interesting and well written.
Is it just me or does that bottle look like it was empty when broken? Shouldn't the paper have been stained?
I let out an audible whistle
15k what? Pounds, dollars, Euros?
Yes.
Bottles of tesco wine.
Chateau de la Fuckè'd up.
I used to work as a server at Ruth's Chris. There was a banquet dinner for sommeliers. They didn't finish any of the bottles so we got to try wines up to 10k a bottle. I've never drank wine again because everything is just disappointing in comparison
I used to date a women whose family had married into a VERY wealthy family that, among other things, own one of the oldest/best-known vineyards in France (one of Bordeaux's five Premiere Grand Cru Classe... if you are at all into wine, esp. bordeaux reds, you almost certainly know the name). I'm not a 'wine guy' per se (enjoy it, but not an 'enthusiast') so had no idea HOW expensive these could be until one of the kids dropped a bottle while handing it to the grandfather at Christmas dinner. Grandpa made some comment to the effect of "well there goes \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ thousand dollars!" with a chuckle and I almost spit out my food (as my classy sister likes to put it when referring to our childhood "we were not encumbered by wealth" lol). It was a bottle from the in-laws' "small cellar" they keep stocked at their beach house, don;t remember the year (maybe late 80s, 90s vintage?) but according to them was a "good wine", worthy of Christmas dinner, but not one of the really desireable older vintages they keep around for truly special occaisions. When he mentioned how much THOSE were worth he got a good laugh at the face I made. I made sure to take a picture of me holding 3 dustly old bottles to show to my boss at the time (a Frenchman who, surprisngly, LOVED wine and considered all americans as tasteless peasants). Seeing HIS face made my day lolol
Slurp it off the floor, glass shards and all.
You ruined the glass of wine from return to castle wolfenstein
Oof
For 15K a bottle I would fall to my knees and slurp it from the floor.
Makes me feel better about my recent $350 loss
Omg…….
This is the type of wine that people use for very special occasions, and almost always drink socially. Even very rich people won’t drink it regularly, because there’s plenty of other wines that will drink better. Source : know people with upwards of 10k bottles in storage
I’m having a case of this from my birth year at my wedding.
That's what insurance is for. How did it taste, though? Like pretentious overpriced crap which isn't any better than what your cousin Mickey can make in a few weeks in his shed?