A rare bottle of French Burgundy has set a new world record for a single bottle of wine of any size after fetching 558,000 U.S. dollars at Sotheby's auction house in New York.
The bottle of 1945 Romanee-Conti auctioned on Saturday is more than 17 times its original estimate of 32,000 dollars. Another bottle of the same wine fetched 496,000 dollars moments later.
Both bottles broke the previous record for the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold, which is a three-liter bottle of 1945 Mouton-Rothschild sold for 310,000 dollars at Sotheby's in 2007, CNBC reported.
Despite their "heavily damp-stained, scuffed, torn, and partially missing labels," the two bottles are "rare and wonderful," Serena Sutcliffe, head of Sotheby's international wine department, wrote in the lot notes.
"The best bottles are so concentrated and exotic, with seemingly everlasting power - a wine at peace with itself," she added.
The Romanee-Conti vineyard is located in the Cote de Nuits region of Burgundy, France. The two rare bottles are one of just 600 made by the vineyard in 1945, which was the last year before the producer pulled up its older, prized vines and replaced them with younger vines in 1947, CNBC reported.
"The new world record established in today's sale is further proof that the demand for wine and spirits of exceptional quality is at an all-time high, and that global collectors are willing to go the extra mile to acquire the rarest bottles of any kind," Jamie Ritchie, head of Sotheby's global wine business, told CNBC.
Earlier this month, a bottle of The Macallan 1926 whisky was sold for a world record price of about 1.1 million dollars to a private telephone bidder from Asia at an auction by Bonhams in Edinburgh, Britain.
That record remains intact even after another bottle of The Macallan whisky named The Macallan 1926 Sir Peter Blake was auctioned Saturday for 843,200 dollars, the highest price in Sotheby's history for a single spirit as well as the top auction price for any spirit sold in North America.
