Lock Up That $25,000 Wine: Big Spender

HOPKINTON, Mass. (TheStreet) -- Wine sellers and enthusiasts routinely call it the greatest vintage of our time. A case of magnums filled with it went for $345,000, or $57,500 a bottle, at a 2006 Christie's auction in Beverly Hills. Little more than 151,000 were bottled and the vintage isn't expected to last another 30 years.

Despite all of this, a retailer in Hopkinton, Mass., left a bottle of 1945 Chateau Mouton Rothschild valued at $25,000 in an unlocked cooler. It doesn't require a moment of clarity to guess what happened next.

The 1945 Chateau Mouton Rothschild is considered one of the best wine vintages.

Four days after two men stole the bottle, it was tracked down with the help of an anonymous tip. With all respect to Hopkinton Wine and Spirits, a vintage with the history, rarity and value of fine artwork should be harder to access than a cold sixer of Bud Light Lime.

"I've been in the best wine cellars in New England with 20,000 bottles, including several bottles of the type that was just stolen," says Brian Wilson, owner of Hopkinton-based Boston Wine Cellar Designs. "They all have locks on them."

Given the vintage's back story, it's a wonder that the '45 isn't under bulletproof glass at the Louvre guarded by lasers and starving dogs. In the waning days of World War II, French winemakers were only just recovering their capacity after the Nazis occupied and plundered the Bordeaux region. Using what little resources they had at their disposal, they grew their grapes in a tumultuous year marked not only by the fall of Berlin, but by a rare May frost in the estate's home village of Pauillac followed by a summer of extreme heat and drought.