Enjoyable article in The New York Times about the theft of some very nice wine indeed.

Apparently a thief made off with 450 bottles of wine, including a rare $11,000 1959 magnum from the Château Pétrus in Bordeaux, France. (Putting them at the top of my list of People I’d Like To Party With.)

Predictably, the NYT takes the opportunity to turn the incident into yet another pseudo-trend story of the lives of the rich and famous:

Wine cellar designers are increasingly installing fingerprint and voice recognition systems and crisscrossing laser beams that trigger alarms (à la the movie “Entrapment” with Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones), said Tod Ban, a wine cellar designer in Atlanta who recently completed such a cellar for a private collector with 27,000 bottles.

Also very much enjoyed this:

“It’s going to be difficult to track,” said John Kapon, the auction director at Acker Merrall & Condit in New York. “The sad truth is, it should be relatively easy for whoever stole it to sell this wine without anyone being able to figure it out.”

Unlike missing art and antiquities, hot wine has no official registry. “Something like an Amber alert would be very useful,” said George Derbalian, the president of Atherton Wine Imports, an importer of Burgundy and Bordeaux.

We’ll get right on that, sir.