The ultra-wealthy have a new favorite status symbol: From a $14.5 million guitar to an $812,500 bottle of wine, rare collectibles are on a tear

John Kapon knew that the bottle of 1945 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti up for sale at his New-York based wine seller’s auction last month was going to do well. After all, it was one of only 600 bottles of the burgundy produced in a year marked in history as end of World War II, and considered one the greatest vintages of all time.

Still, it was a little shocking when the bottle sold for $812,500—setting a new world record for a bottle of wine sold at auction at nearly 50% more than the record price that same bottle had fetched in 2018. “Scarcity really drives the bus,” says Kapon. “When it comes to really rare, and really old wines among the greatest, people don’t really care what they pay for it.”

Wines are not the only category of collectible items seeing a surge in value at auction. Last month, the 1969 black Fender Stratocaster guitar that Pink Floyd member David Gilmour played on that band’s most iconic albums, including “Dark Side of the Moon,” went for $14.55 million at a Christie’s auction. That was more than double the $6 million record set in 2020 for a guitar, a 1959 Martin D-18E that Kurt Cobain played in Nirvana’s “MTV Unplugged” performance decades earlier. Only weeks before that, a rare Pokémon Pikachu Illustrator card, one of........

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