[BURGLARS NAB WINE VALUED AT $500,000]
Heist occurs when Bay Area rare vintage market is hot
By S.L. Wykes, MEDIANEWS STAFF
Article Last Updated: 01/15/2007 02:46:22 AM PST

Wine industry expert Eileen Frederikson wasn't surprised when she heard that thieves had broken into an Atherton home earlier this month and hauled off wine valued at half a million dollars. More than 150 bottles were swiped, worth an average $3,000 each, the owner told police. One bottle alone, a magnum of 1959 Petrus, is valued between $4,000 and $6,000. "It's rare to have $500,000 worth of wine in an average house," Frederikson said, "but the Peninsula doesn't have a lot of average houses." Nor are wine collections valued in the millions uncommon in the Bay Area. In fact, says local wine merchant Joe Zugelder, at least 100 private wine collections in the region reach into seven figures. "There's a lot of money in this area, and we're close to the wine country," he said. What crafty crooks may finally have noticed is that fine wine has never been a cooler asset — and the market, legitimate and not, is hot. With rare exceptions, bottles of wine don't have serial numbers, making them nearly untraceable — unless they're in a class like the 1787 Chateau d'Yquem, which sold last year for $90,000. Someone with wine smarts took a very select group of wines from the Atherton home Jan. 4 in what could be one of the largest wine heists ever. The thieves took everything except four or five bottles of lesser value, police said. Finding someone to buy the stolen Atherton wine won't be as easy "as it is to sell a laptop or a big screen TV," said Shaun Green, who works with Zugelder at K&L Fine Wine Merchants, a nationally known wine business with showrooms in Redwood City and San Francisco. Whoever did the theft "knew what they were doing," said master sommelier Reggie Narito of San Jose. Some of the most highly valued wines are those made in limited numbers — cult wines, they're called — for which buyers get on a waiting list to be included on the mailing list sent out when bottles are available to sell. Some winemakers will sign bottles; others number bottles. Identifying marks are the rare exception, however. An Italian firm is experimenting with producing bottles with embedded microchips, but that's more about deterring counterfeiters than wine cellar burglars.

Reputable wine auction houses and merchants such as K&L are conservative in their buying. "The majority of collections we offer come from collectors we are very familiar with," said Paul Hart, of Hart Davis Hart Wine Co. in Chicago. The market for high-end wines is reflected in this coming month's Hart Davis Hart auction. The bottles for sale are valued from $3.5 million to $5.2 million. And the company holds monthly auctions of that size. Fine wine, industry analyst Frederikson said, is now a luxury item whose most avid buyers operate on a "sky's the limit" philosophy. "Some," she said, "will send a chauffeur in, say, 'I don't care what it is; just make sure it's prestigious. We're having a party Saturday night.'" That philosophy is driving sales of California wines, many of which occupy cult status, toward new heights. In 2006, sales reached $2.5 billion for wines priced at $25 and up. Not all collectors are driven by status. Nor are they all people with huge wealth. A bottle of Silver Oak Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon that sold for $60 in 1996 is now worth $149. "It's pretty easy for a middle-class guy to come up with a $50,000 cellar in a short time," Green said. Many collectors buy for sentimental reasons — to commemorate a birth or wedding. Some love to share a rare wine with friends. Others seek out specific bottles to build a collection that might represent every year of wine ever produced by a certain winery. The stolen wines included a highly coveted and difficult-to-assemble set of red Bordeaux representing an unbroken line of more than 20 years of harvests. Bordeaux's appeal, wine critic Alan Duran said, springs not only from the region's reputation for producing some of the best wine in the world, but also from the wine's long drinking life, something serious collectors appreciate. Bordeaux wines "are a reference point for quality," he said. "And they fetch high prices at auction. I can see why there's theft going on." A South Bay collector, who asked that his name not be used to protect his collection, got a call one day from the storage facility where he kept a sizable number of his wines. Someone had cut the lock off the door and cleaned him out. But the police told him there was nothing they could do. Within a week, he saw what he's convinced was his collection for sale online. "I sent the guy an e-mail asking him not to sell it, that I was sending a detective to check it out. The guy wrote back, 'There's no way you can prove these are yours anyway. There are no serial numbers.'"

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