It was meant to be a collector’s secret but someone knew the secret, stole the secret and, it seems, drank the secret: what the owner calls “the most expensive vodka bottle in the world.”
The bottle was created by Dartz Motorz, a car manufacturer in Riga, Latvia, and fitted with an original 1912 leather ribbon from the company’s first Monte Carlo rally car.
The bottle is made of 6.6 pounds (3 kg) of gold and the equivalent amount of silver and has a diamond-encrusted cap fashioned to resemble a vintage car front.
It had been borrowed and placed in a pub, Cafe 33, in central Copenhagen amid a collection of fine spirits assembled by Brian Ingberg, the bar’s owner.
The bottle was worth $1.3 million (€1.08 million), according to Ingberg.
The vodka bottle, said to be one of a kind, made a brief appearance in the third season of Netflix's House of Cards. On the show, the Russian president, Viktor Petrov, introduces it in a toast to his American counterpart, Frank Underwood, played by Kevin Spacey.
On Tuesday, a masked thief sneaked into Cafe 33 with a flashlight, poked around and absconded with the bottle from Ingberg’s collection of vodkas gathered over a quarter-century.
A surveillance video showed a man using a key to enter the basement of the pub, locating the bottle and dashing out with it.
After days of searching, police announced on Friday that the world’s most expensive vodka bottle had been found, dented.
And empty.
It was found at the entrance to a building site in Charlottenlund, an affluent district north of the Danish capital.
Copenhagen police said in a Twitter post that the bottle was being examined for any leads and no further information on the case would be released.
Shortly before the bottle was found, Ingberg said he was contacted by a man who said he knew who had the bottle and that the thief wanted to return it to the collector.
“I got the feeling that he felt he was in trouble because of the police and Leon in Russia wanting to send people out to look for it,” Ingberg said, referring to Leonard F Yankelovich, Dartz’s founder and the actual owner of the bottle. “It’s not the most fun item to possess.” – New York Times Service
