Daily News Channel
Late last year, at a Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong, an anonymous Chinese phone bidder paid $232,000 each for three bottles of 1869 Château Lafite Rothschild, a Napoleon III — era wine that was already maturing nicely when the Boxer uprising stymied European imperial ambitions in China. That price smashed the previous record of $156,450, paid in 1985 by the Forbes publishing family for a 1787 Lafite bottled for U.S.
So obscure, so ignominiously in the shadow of Dictator Benito Mussolini, is bantamweight King Vittorio Emanuele III that news last week that he had actually done something important came to most Italians as a pleasant shock. His Majesty, after deliberating off & on for 22 years, finally handed down his decision as arbiter between France and Mexico in the forgotten matter of minute Clipperton Island, 700 miles off the Mexican shore, annexed by France in 1857, seized by Mexican Dictator Porfirio Diaz in 1897