I endorse everything in your post, lol.
This, 100%. And drink with my close wine buddies.
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Sold by the same auction house that Rudy Kurniawan used. And a bottle that Rudy liked to fake.
VM
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For perspective, the most expensive baseball card ever sold was a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle for over $12 million. (This surprised me when I looked it up - I had no idea the 1910 Honus Wagner had been surpassed.) That’s a piece of cardboard that has no intrinsic properties to differentiate itself in any way from a skilled counterfeit, unlike the RC.
So $800,000 for one of the rarest and most historically important wines ever made is quite cheap in the scheme of collectibles. If the buyer holds onto it, it probably won’t take too long before he can resell for double or triple. If, on the other hand, the buyer decides to open it, I hope it will be in the company of people with the perspective and skill to record the experience for the historical record, as opposed to just jotting down “six stars, omg.” Not sure another shot at this one will ever arise.
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This one has a pretty good provenance ; it originally came from the Drouhin cellars.
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Nevertheless corks of this age can easily fail when transported so if the purchaser intends to drink it they should do so soon after arrival. And certainly not at a ‘wine event’, wines are best enjoyed one at a time.
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This bottle could even surpass the 2017’s that everyone on here is so fired up about 
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Too old.
Why?
It’s a 80 year old 750 mL bottle. Unless it was at really low temperatures in the Drouhin cellar, the odds of it being good aren’t fantastic.
This is the ultimate unicorn- there really is not a price too high in my view.
I do not have eyes everywhere, but to my knowledge only 11 satisfactorily authenticated bottles of this wine have been sold at auction in the past 4 decades. And to have one of those bottles direct from Drouhin’s cellar is about the best provenance one could ask.
To give some context- it is my understanding that production of 1945 Romanee Conti was 608 bottles in total- no large formats. Note also that general market opinions about the longevity of DRC- and burgundy in general- were completely reshaped by both Rudi and the fact an active market of buyers of anything rare will often conform to what buyers want versus reality.
When I started seriously tasting and researching wine in the mid 1990s, the few auction houses selling wine at the time often offered up DRC. Generally speaking, 1985 and occasionally 1978 generated the highest interest and strongest prices. This was not true for the Khoury sales or the very few sales of similar provenance, but generally speaking the prices started to go down for vintages more than 20-30 years old, even good vintages. And you almost never saw 1945s offered at all.
To give another context- when I was in college and grand school I belonged to a burgundy tasting group in Austin that had some incredible members. One was a retired computer programmer who was a big player in the early days. He had a formidable palate, an easygoing nature and a blazing intellectual curiosity and passion for wine itself. Zero interest in auctions, marketplaces etc. He would have hated this forum and every other wine forum online I suspect. He was a purist in the best sense of the word. Every December, our group did a DRC tasting and one year he brought a glorious 1959 Grands-Echezeaux. As he and I discussed it later that night, I asked him why he had never brought a 1985 or 1978- aside from this 1959 he usually would bring vintages less than 30 years old. He told me quite simply that 1978 and 1985 were great vintages but has passed their peaks and he had drunk them long ago. Granted that is one palate’s opinion- but it stands in stark contrast to market knowledge of today which is not driven so much by what is in the bottle.
Point being- I think it is highly likely that the vast majority of authentic bottles of 1945 Romanee Conti were consumed prior to the world wine market boom starting in the mid 1990s and that the vast majority of what remain unopened are in the hands of established and esteemed European collectors who have no intention of selling them.
In the late 1990s to early 2000s, 1945 Romanee Conti in bottle and magnum suddenly appeared on the market- most notably at Premier Cru. And so even before Rudi came along, 1945 Romanee Conti became mysteriously available just when a market of dickswinging collectors and investors wanted and needed it to be there. The fraud has expanded since then. Up to that point, Jayer was a common fraud- and there remain to this day cases upon cases of suspect Jayer wines, so this was not a new phenomenon- but 1945 Romanee Conti quickly became the most high profile example of obvious fraud to anyone who was paying attention (and as Maureen Downey can attest- not many of us were paying attention back then, and we were often quickly dismissed for raising alarms.)
As for this particular bottle, I think it stands a good chance of being miraculous- the usual caveats about older bottles still applying. What makes the best 1945 Bordeaux and Burgundies stand out is an incredibly firm and long lasting structure of tannins and acids that allowed the wines time to develop a jawdropping array of nuances. The fruit is there too- but secondary to the tertiary elements. That is in strong contrast to 1949, 1953 and 1959 (and 1969 for Burgundy)- all of which are now fading and most of which have been fading for the past 20 years. But the best 1945s I have had remain incredibly durable and fresh. And so for a wine like Romanee Conti that is revered for its subtleties, 1945 could still prove a magical experience and I think has a better chance of doing so today than any other vintage of that era.
JMHO.
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Even then.It is possible but not likely.
I’d buy it just to give it a Three Stooges rating.
And have a back-up bottle ready.
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FYI the room gave the man who bought it a standing ovation. Never seen that before. He was part of the group drinking these.
My money is on it being flipped.
Excellent post Tom
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Would be a bummer if the wine is corked, lol
Was that the group from TX?
Some were from TX, but you make a lot of friends with 20 bottles of Tâche lol.
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