Getty Image / Brandon Bell
The wine industry is a serious business. Wine has been a luxury good for much of the last millennium, captivating the rich and poor worldwide with its complexities and regional differences.
Some of the world’s most extensive wine collections are worth millions. Billionaire Bill Koch, of political Koch Brothers fame, has one of the world’s biggest and finest collections of wine, at over 45,000 unique bottles of wine worth untold millions.
The business is cutthroat, too, as forgeries and fakes can be common. Koch himself was swindled over a bottle of wine thought to be possessed at one time by founding father Thomas Jefferson, only to find out the bottle was produced in the 1960s. And, the Netflix documentary Sour Grapes dealt with the extensive, international wine fraud perpetrated by Inonesian international Rudy Kurniawan. He was making fake vintage wines by mixing cheap wines to match the exact flavor profiles of some of the world’s most expensive bottles, and using advanced labeling techniques to make the labels look authentic. He was only caught when he advertised a bottle of wine made in 1923, only for that vineyard to have not made wine until 1924.
Wine, as with many fine goods, appreciates in value as it ages. Though, wine does have a reason, at least on the surface, as the natural flavors of the product, which are controlled by many factors like soil, climate, and what the wine is aged in, are said to be more intense and clear as time goes by.
Many of us have old wine lying around somewhere, and it’s usually completely worthless. But, sometimes, there are bottles that appreciate in value that we completely forget about, and that happened to one man recently. Here’s Yahoo! with more details.
A California man is selling a rare bottle of wine he’s been keeping in his basement.
Mark Paulson said he bought the bottle for $250 in the 1970s, but left it unopened for decades.
The auction house handling the sale estimates the bottle could go for between $50,000 and $80,000.
A California man could make tens of thousands of dollars thanks to a bottle of wine he bought in the 1970s and never opened.
According to a report by The Washington Post, Mark Paulson bought a bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti La Tâche in the 1970s and left it alone, unopened, inside a cardboard box in his basement for decades. Paulson initially purchased the 1971 bottle for $250 — the equivalent of $1,889 today when adjusted for inflation.
“It’s just been sitting downstairs in my basement for all these years,” he told The Post. “Never really thought that much about it.”
Now, however, it’s headed to auction, where it could fetch between about $50,000 and $80,000, according to the auction house Bonhams Skinner.
Wow. I’m going to go tell my parents to check their wine collection.