An extremely rare bottle of 1951 Penfolds Grange sold at a Langton’s Fine Wine auction Sunday night, for a record AU$67,000 reports Business Insider.
With the 16.5 percent buyer’s premium, the AU$78,000 paid by the winning anonymous online bidder smashed the country’s previous AU$51,750 record, set less than a year ago.
Bottles of the 1951 vintage were most recently opened and tasted during a 2012 Penfolds Re-corking Clinic, with tasting notes from the winery suggesting that the vintage is “past its peak,” but “some bottles still have fruit sweetness and flavour length.”
Instead, the wine is prized for its historical significance, having been the experimental first vintage produced by Penfolds’ founding winemaker Max Schubert. Just 100 cases of the 100 percent Shiraz were made, with bottles given as gifts to Schubert’s family and friends. It is believed that there are less than two dozen left in existence.
Also available at the “Rewards of Patience” auction was a complete set of Grange, from 1951 to 2013, which sold for AU$265,001. While this, too, seems like an astronomical price tag, it pales somewhat compared to the AU$332,608 paid for an identical 63-bottle set in December last year. Ouch!
