A Colorful Display of Wine Extravegance
Last week many of us read about the sale over in London of an extraordinary collection of wine: A 135-Bottle Vertical Collection of Chateau d’Yquem ranging from 1860 to 2003.
First off, if you don’t salivate at the very thought of obtaining such a collection of wine then, well, then I question your status as even a semi-wine geek.
Steve Bachmann over at The Wine Collector Blog, a member of the board of directors of the society for wine geeks, has a very interesting post on the collection, including thoughts on the $1.5 million price paid for the wines and the custom cabinet it came in.
What interest me about this episode in wine geekery and wine collecting is not so much the price since I’m not in the wine investment or collecting business. Rather, I’m fascinated by the appearance of the youngest and oldest bottle next to each other.
The impact that the appearance of these wines has on someone looking over the collection critically or casually is much more than if we were looking at an ancient bottle of claret next to a new bottle: You can actually examine in detail the change in the liquid that occurs over time. This can’t be done with colored glass. And I suspect this unique aspect of d’Yquem has a real impact on its cache, particularly older bottles. I don’t care…that’s just pretty damn cool.
You can check out images of all the bottles in the collection HERE.
The buyer got a bargain at about $11,100 a bottle compared to the man in September, at Christie’s in Los Angeles, who ended up paying about $26,000 a standard bottle for two cases of Mouton-Rothschild 1945 — one was a case of six magnums — at $365,000 total. You pays yer money and you takes yer choice.
Now I am salivating….. I wish I could afford to drink even modern Yquems more often than once in a Preston Guild.
Alastair