Shipwrecked Madiera To Be Sold At Auction

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed)
Aug 30th 2010 at 11:03PM

From the depths of the ocean to your wine cellar. Spectrum Wine Auctions, Southern California's leading auction house of fine and rare wine, will hold its first sale of the fall 2010 auction season on September 24 including a bottle of shipwrecked Madeira wine dating to the 1800s. The bottle, which is estimated at $1200 was discovered off of the Savannah, Georgia coast by professional diver Bill Kinsey in the late 1970s. The lot comes from a collector who bought the only two bottles from the shipwreck in 1980 at The Heublein Premiere National Auction of Rare Wines XII. He tasted the first one on television and noted that it was fantastic and in perfect condition. The thick mud on the ocean floor protected the bottles from worms and water.

The sale will take place at 6 p.m. PDT at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills and Saturday, September 25 at 9:00 a.m. HKT at the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong. Other highlights from the sale include some of the greatest vintages from producers in Bordeaux, Burgundy and California including 37 lots of Harlan Cabernet Sauvignon, 47 lots of Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignon and several verticals of Chateau Montelena in magnum, three-liter and five-liter bottles. The total pre-sale estimate for the 761 lots on offer is $3.2 million.

Tags: madeira, shipwrecked wine, spectrum wine auction, wine auction