Making off with the Petrus
One of my friends who knows about my love for wine forwarded this New York Times article to me today. It seems that an incredibly discerning thief, or group of thieves, broke into a huge house in an affluent California neighborhood and made off with the Petrus. This is fascinating stuff as the burglar(s) left behind other valuable items. They went straight for the Bordeaux et al.
Wow. I must admit I have thought about stealing a bottle of wine, but only in the context of the sort of a doomsday/zombie movie fantasy in which I am the last person left on Earth, sort of like Charlton Heston in The Omega Man, but without the underground-dwelling cultists. My first stop would be the Ferrari dealer and my second stop would be a good wine cellar at a local restaurant. But only if there were no zombie sommeliers waiting to eat my brains.
On a separate note, have you ever noticed that dog owners tend to resemble their dogs? Of course you have. Everyone notices that. It makes sense in a way, if you assume that a dog is an extension of an owner’s self-image. But have you ever noticed that people with interesting or funny last names tend to take jobs that contrast with their names? For example, that article quotes a woman named Theresa Lawless. That’s a cool last name, but it seems even more interesting when you consider that her job is to manage insurance policies and help her company avoid fraudulent cases. It’s sort of like a book I am reading now about gender in computer design, co-authored by a person named Pain. Nice.
Seriously though, I wonder if the police are considering this robbery an inside job as an insurance scam and not just something the butler did in his spare time. Wine is an interesting possession. Once you consume a bottle, it’s gone. You cannot consume diamonds, or gold, or paintings, or many of the other aesthetically pleasing things in life. But wine is an agricultural product with a shelf life. You can drink it and make it vanish forever. And if you’re really clever, you can have it “stolen” from your wine cellar, keep it for later consumption somewhere else, and pocket the insurance money. They say it takes money to make money. Apparently if you have a whole lot of money, you can have your wine and steal it too.
Anyway, this story interests me because the theft was only about $100,000 worth of wine, which equates to about 25-35 bottles since they say in the story that the average bottle value was $3,000 and some magnums were stolen. The logistics of such a theft are fairly impressive. It’s hard to run with a fragile magnum of 1959 Petrus, so they must have known they had plenty of time. I’m actually confused because the article claims the following:
- Wine valued at about $100,000 was stolen
- The average bottle stolen was worth $3,000
- There were 450 bottles stolen
By my math, that’s $1.35M, not $100K. Hmm. Something doesn’t add up here. But hey, the story is worth reading and I hope to find out how these crooks plan to move a magnum of 1959 Petrus without drawing all sorts of attention from auction houses. I wonder if resale or consumption was the motive….