I see it the other way. I’m rooting for the seller. If someone is dumb enough to waste their money on an overpriced, pretty-labelled Sauvignon Blanc, they deserve to get fleeced.
It reminds me of something that happened back in alt.food.wine days. When the market for the 1982-1990 vintages really took off, someone posted repeatedly for quite a long time a bottle of some obscure 1989 cru bourgeois for $2,000. He was not alone. I remember in the mid 90s going to a liquor store here in Austin and finding some 1991 Dame de Montrose hiding in a case in the corner with some other 1991 Bordeaux. I picked up a Dame de Montrose and was headed to the front to ask the price (1991s were few and far between and I wanted to try some for kicks), and the owner got very upset with me and told me to put the bottle back. As I was doing so, he informed me that those two cases of rare Bordeaux were worth several hundred dollars a bottle and he was saving them to sell to help put his kid through college. No joke! Even ITBers (though he was a low end liquor guy so not wine savvy) can get it wrong when they get caught up in the excitement.
The logic in the Screaming Eagle ad is classically flawed. If it were right, then DRC Montrachet should be selling for $30K a bottle as Romanee Conti goes for $10-15K.
White wine, Sauvignon Blanc. No winery name is sufficiently illustrious to get past those two hangups if you are trying to price something versus a Cab or Pinot on the rarity factor. Might get a sucker at $1K, but even then not so sure. If it were Chardonnay sure, but Sauvignon Blanc?! (Not knocking SB- nice stuff, but there is a reason Clos St. Hune and Montrachet aren’t planted with Sauvignon Blanc…)
I paid half that for 2009 Roumier Musigny. Egg on face but I am good. Thanks for the link- this I would not have forseen.
This is actually really great. Screaming Eagle is a truly great Cab- not my style, but for what they are doing they are the best of the best. Something so unique should not sell for so much if everyone who buys really understands the wine. Even less so for a Sauvignon Blanc from the same house. But this auction tells the tale of the rest so wonderfully.
EDIT- I am still marvelling at this. Checked winesearcher. $1850 and $20,000 the only offerings. 15 years now I have been opining about the complexities of the wine marketplace- and this one winebid auction sums it all up for about half the entire marketplace.
How on earth is the seller a “shyster”? He is offering a bottle of wine to the general public for a stated price. If someone interested in that bottle of wine, they are free to buy it or pass. I happen to think that someone that would pay that much (1) can probably afford it and (2) probably knows exactly what they are getting. He may be foolish to me because I doubt the wine is 1000th as good as the price suggestions, but in no way is there something fraudulent and/or deceiving about the transaction.
And it sets such a great example for the kids: “What do you do at work, Daddy?” “Well, honey, I try to find chumps dumb enough to pay wildly inflated prices for stuff. Isn’t your daddy clever?”
How about if your elderly mother is dumb enough to fall for some rip-off home repair gypsies? Or a phishing email con and she ends up losing her savings. I mean, fleecing people is fleecing people, right?
In an ideal world, this bottle would be “bought” by some Nigerian or Russian internet scam artist, paying with a bogus credit card of course; thinking he was getting something of some great value, the “buyer” would pay for the overseas shipping, then the bottle turns out to be hopelessly corked.
During the depression a man was selling pencils on the street for $25,000 apiece. Another man comes up and says “at that price you are not going to sell many pencils”. The pencil man says “True, but I only need to sell one”.