How a retired navy vet with punk rock roots ended up with a bottle of $100K wine | CBC Radio

Mark Paulson is about to make a whole lot of money — and it’s all thanks to his wine-fuelled punk rock party days in 1970s San Francisco.

A bottle of fine red wine that Paulson bought for $250 US ($336.18 Cdn) in in the late ’70s from a San Francisco liquor store is going up for auction, where it’s expected to fetch as much as $80,000 US ($107,576 Cdn).

It’s a three-litre bottle of La Tache from the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti winery in France’s Burgundy region. Paulson bought it when was young and spent his nights sipping wine with rock ‘n’ rollers. Since then, he’s kept it stored in his basement cellar.

“I would have loved to have drank the wine. I always talked about that,” Paulson, the 72-year-old retired commercial painter and Vietnam War vet, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.

“I’m glad I didn’t.”

From the Panama Canal to San Francisco

Paulson never really intended to become a connoisseur or collector of fine wines.

He was born and raised in Panama, where his Irish grandparents immigrated to work on the construction of the Panama Canal. When he grew up, he joined the U.S. Navy, was discharged in 1971, and has been in San Francisco ever since. 

“I was pretty happy to get out. Vietnam was crazy,” he said. 

Not long after settling in the city, Paulson fell in with a group of artistic friends, including several members of the rock band the Flamin’ Groovies, considered one of the forerunners of the punk rock movement.

The old gang would get together, listen to tunes, drink delicious wines, and party all night. They would make T-shirts of their favourite vintages. 

Some of those boozy evenings, Paulson said, “got pretty crazy.”

“There was usually about six of us. We’d probably have six bottles of old rare wines,” he said. “San Francisco was a whole new world after growing up in the jungle.”

He bought the bottle of La Tache from a liquor store on San Francisco’s Clement Street in or around 1977. The $250 US price tag was a steep one, even then. Adjusted for inflation, it was the equivalent of $2,000 US.

But he knew the owner, Roger, from his friend group, and trusted his recommendations.

“He had taught me a lot, and [he said] it was going to be the best of the best,” Paulson said. “I couldn’t drink it, you know. Like, it was too much and all that. And I just decided to keep it for my daughter’s wedding.”

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His daughter got married last year, but by then, the family had agreed it was better to sell the wine. 

He knew it would fetch a nice sum of money, and he was almost ready to sell it to a buyer for $5,000 US, when his son decided to Google it.

They soon learned that a similar bottle sold at auction in November 2022 for $81,250 US.

“I was, like, floored,” Paulson said. 

What’s so special about this wine?

Louis Krieger, director of fine wines at the auction house Bonhams Skinner, says Paulson and his friends the group were way ahead of their time when it came to wine appreciation the U.S.

And Paulson, he says, is not your typical collector. 

When Krieger first showed up at Paulson’s house to examine his collection, he found him in his backyard, decked out in sweats, pulling weeds from the garden.

“He is sort of the anti-wine collector,” Krieger said. “He is, you know, laid back and easygoing and he loves wine and he loves the sort of conviviality and the companionship that the bottles come with.”

So what makes this one bottle so valuable? First of all, it’s from the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, which Krieger says is “one of — if not the — greatest winery in the world.”

The bottle is even rarer for its size. La Tache is already in limited production, with about 1,000 to 1,300 cases produced annually.

But the vast majority of that — upwards of 98 per cent — comes in the form of 750-millilitre bottles. Paulson’s bottle is three litres, what’s known as a jeroboam.

Krieger says there’s no way to be sure how many other unopened 1971 three-litre bottles of La Tache are out there, but it’s extremely rare.

“We encounter really unique and special bottles with frequency, and this is something that sort of stopped all of us in our tracks,” Krieger said. 

But what makes Paulson’s collection so special, Krieger says, is the personal history. He says the retired painter regaled him with memories attached to each bottle in his home — both unopened and empty.

“This was like a major part of his life,” Krieger said. “There was a moment when he signed the contract and I took the bottle — and I don’t want to make it too dramatic — but, like, there was this, like, heavy silence for a minute where, you know, he was sort of moving on to the next sort of chapter.”

Paulson’s La Tache will be up for auction on Bonhams Skinner’s website between April 16-26. The auction house values it at between $50,000 and $80,000 US. 

When it sells, Paulson is planning to mark the occasion by cracking open another vintage from his collection — a 1959 Chateau Latour.

But he won’t be sharing this one with his old party friends. The Flamin’ Groovies are still active, with shows in the Bay Area scheduled for later this month. But Paulson says he lost touch with the group about 25 years ago.

“After I started a family, I moved out of the city and life became different,” he said. “You work every day. You don’t party at night.”