Stolen: World’s most expensive bottle of vodka

The world’s most expensive bottle of vodka was stolen from a bar in Copenhagen. Hi everyone, it’s Jeff and welcome to the new Monday edition of Plain English. Today is January 29, 2018 and our main topic today is the theft of a bottle of vodka valued at over a million dollars. And in the second half of the program, we’ll talk about what it means to get cold feet—and just a clue, it has nothing to do with temperature.

Before we get into all that, though, I wanted to just remind you that the transcript for this episode can be found for free at PlainEnglish.com/16 and like every episode, the transcript includes instant translations of difficult words and phrases from English to Spanish, Chinese, French, and, new this week, Portuguese. If it’s hard for you to understand every word, I really encourage you to read the transcript as you listen. It will help you associate the sound of each word with how it’s written; and if you don’t understand everything, then the translations on the web site should help.

Vodka heist

You’ve heard of expensive bottles of wine, but vodka? What one collector called the world’s most expensive bottle of vodka, said to be worth $1.3 million, was stolen and probably consumed.

The bottle was created by a Latvian company called Dartz Motorz, which actually makes armored vehicles and is behind the vodka maker Russo-Baltique. It was was supposed to be a private collector’s item and was owned by the founder of Dartz, Leonard Yankelovich. The bottle itself was made of 13 pounds of gold and silver mixed together featured a leather ribbon from a vintage Monte Carlo rally car. The diamond-encrusted cap was made to look like the front of a vintage car. It is the only bottle of its kind ever made. Unlike wine, which is usually valuable because of how the contents taste, this vodka was primarily valuable because of the bottle itself, though the actual vodka was made with melted snow from the French Alps.

The famous bottle was on loan to Brian Ingberg, the owner of the bar Café 33 in Copenhagen, Denmark. The bar owner has amassed an impressive collection of liquor over the years, including over 1,000 bottles of vodka.

A replica of the bottle made a cameo appearance in the Netflix show House of Cards. When the fictional Russian president toasts the show’s US president, played by Kevin Spacey, he used vodka that came from this bottle. On the show, they said the bottle was worth a mere $750,000.

But in a scene that could have been from a movie, a completely disguised man broke into the Copenhagen café, searched for the bottle in the dark basement with a flashlight, took it off the shelf, and fled. This was all caught on the bar’s surveillance video and it seems that the thief entered the basement of the bar with a key. The BBC released footage of the theft.

Brian Ingberg, the bar owner, said the bottle was a secret—and that only a few people knew that it was in his café. For that reason, police think that the thief either worked at the café or heard about the bottle from an employee—and somehow got a copy of the key. Right after the theft, the bar posted images of the bottle and the thief and asked the public to get involved. The crime made international headlines and drew heavy police attention.

The police searched Copenhagen for days without luck. Then, construction workers in an area north of Copenhagen discovered the bottle discarded in a construction site, empty, of course. Fortunately the actual bottle only suffered a small dent. The police are continuing to search for the thief and don’t know if the vodka was poured out or if someone drank it. They examined the bottle for DNA, fingerprints, or other clues about the perpetrator.

The bar owner thinks the thief got cold feet and placed the bottle in a place where it would definitely be found. Regardless, he said he’s happy that the bottle has been recovered, and that “the vodka god saved us.”

Before we start on the second half of the program, I wanted to say hi and thank you to Lorenia from Veracruz. She is one of our most loyal listeners and promoters; she’s been listening since the very beginning. I’m positive that on her next trip to the United States, she’ll be even more confident and know even more English than she knows now. So thanks to Lorenia for listening every week.