$111K for a Bottle? Sure!…$500…Nope!

Posted by Tom Wark on May 22, 2006

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Working at and for Winebid.com in the late 1990s was exciting on a number of different levels. It was the DotCom boom so you felt like you were changing the way the wine world worked buy creating an online market for rare wine. And it worked. Thousands of people bought and sold rare and not-so-rare wines at Winebid.

The other part of the excitement had not so much to do with being part of the DotCom phenomenon but in watching wines soar in bid price. It wasn’t so much that the the higher the price someone was willing to pay for the wine the more Winebid.com would make it commissions, but rather it was the normal excitement that comes with watching any type of auction with a number of willing bidders. Watching the price go up and up is….well, it’s pretty cool.

This weekend a case of 1974 Heitz Cellars Martha’s Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon sold for $19,975 at a Sothebys wine auction in New York. For some time now this wine has been the quintessential American Cabernet to collect. I presume it’s drinking just fine. But at $1600 per bottle the ’74 "Martha’s Vineyard" is becoming one of those wines one purchases in order to possess, rather than to drink. It is leaving the realm of consumable and entering the world of art.

At the same auction a bottle of 1865 Lafite went for $111,000. Clearly art at this point.

What’s interesting is the idea of justifying these prices. For this wine lover, it’s far easier to understand spending $111K on a 150 year old wine or even $1600 on a 30 year old American Classic, than spending $500 for a bottle of wine that is meant to be drunk, not displayed.

I understand the desire to possess something rare, to surround oneself with history that means something to you. It’s much more difficult to understand spending $400 or $500 on something that is meant to disappear down your throat then be washed back into the local sewage system.

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