The World's Most Expensive Planter Box

As promised, here is the story of the world's most expensive planter box. As you study the picture above, you may be asking yourself: where are the wirelessly transmitting solar-powered moisture sensors? Is that ‘heirloom’ sage? And how come the box isn't made of solid gold?

These are all very good questions, and I'm afraid that the answers I have might not be the answers you are looking for. As you can see, this is just an old wine box filled with dirt and some plants from Home Depot. But, this is no ordinary wine box; before housing my herbs, it used to contain 12 bottles of 2001 Chateau d'Yquem Sauternes. From Sauternes, the region, comes Sauternes, arguably the finest sweet wine in the world. Chateau d'Yquem makes the finest Sauternes in the world, and 2001 was their finest vintage in 50 years; or so, at least, says his eminence Robert M. Parker who bestowed upon the wine his highly coveted 100 point rating.

All of which is to say:

1. This is a very special box
2. For the price of the wine that used to be inside, you could buy a perfectly decent used car

So, how did I get this box? Well, I can assure you that it wasn't by buying the wine (unfortunately). No, if there was any currency exchanged in this transaction, it was that of wine geekery. In exchange for this box, I offered up my well-worn copy of Matt Kramer's classic, and long out-of-print, book on the Cote d'Or Making Sense of Burgundy. It's a wonderful book, and the only reason I was willing to give it up was that I had read and re-read it so many times as to have it memorized. And so, through the magic of barter, and with a little help from the Postal Service, two wine geeks managed to get that much closer to maximizing their utility. Meanwhile, the apocalypse approaches with increasing speed.

Posted at 07:30 on Thu, 11 Jun 2009 in category wine | Comments (1)