Entries associated with the tag "wine":

Chicago wine auction house Hart Davis Hart is touting its record-breaking sale last weekend at Tru of one of the largest single-owner wine collections ever to go on the block, heavy on first-growth vintage Bordeaux such as Haut-Brion, Margaux, and Latour. According to the company, the auction brought in $11,160,583, the fourth largest take for a wine auction in history.

The first lot up for bid, 12 bottles of 1982 Château Lafite-Rothschild broke a world record for the wine, selling to a Chinese bidder for $54,970. The number one bid? $179,250 for one case of 1990 Romanée-Conti Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. 

I ran this by wine economist Tyler Colman, aka Dr. Vino who was impressed, noting that half the Lafite-Rothschild lots sold to an unidentified Asian buyer who was bidding remotely.

"Maybe some creative financial type will set up derivatives to be able to short Lafite," he wrote.

One other food drink-related event this weekend: On Sunday, Wall Street Journal business reporter Julia Flynn Siler promotes her exhaustive new account of the life and times of America's most influential wine family, The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty.

It just hit bookstores last week but it's apparently flying off the shelves trailing clouds of controversy, with Napa Valley loyalists calling it a hit job and combing the pages for typos and factual errors and others defending Flynn Siler as a meticulous reporter. She spent three years on the case, and, as she herself says, the Mondavis don't like her much any more.

Based on this excerpt here, it sounds fascinating--it's going right under Wild Fermentation on my summer must-read list.

Flynn Siler discusses the book Sunday at 2 PM at the Book Cellar in Lincoln Square; she's also in Skokie at Schaefer's Wine, Foods & Spirits from 11 AM to 5 PM Saturday.