The World's Most Expensive Vodka Was Stolen, Then Abandoned

They call it the world's most expensive bottle of vodka. We don't know for certain if it is, but we have no reason to doubt it. The bottle itself is made from 3 kilograms of gold and 3 kilograms of silver, and the cap is covered in diamonds. A strap around the bottle comes from a century-old award-winning racecar. Russian automaker Russo-Baltique made the piece to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of their factory opening.

The bottle's worth $1.3 million. There's a chance you saw it on the show House of Cards, where the Russian Prime Minister not-Vladimir not-Putin gives it to the US president.

In 2017, Russo-Baltique lent the bottle to a bar in Denmark, which maintained a little museum of vodka bottles. The collection included 1,200 bottles, with the Russo-Baltique one clearly the highlight. So when a thief entered the bar in January 2018, that was the one thing he stole.

He might have had some trouble finding a buyer, but he could always pry of the gems and melt down the metal and sell those. So, bar owner Brian Ingberg figured the treasure might have been lost forever. We don't know what sort of agreement he'd had with Russo-Baltique, but we're picturing him hiding in terror from the inevitable Russian mafia enforcers who'd come to collect.

But then the bottle turned up ... at a construction site. The metal, the diamonds, and even the strap were all intact. The only thing missing was the vodka (which was just ordinary vodka, nothing special at all). "I feel fantastic," said Ingberg. "The vodka god saved us."

Security cameras had captured footage of the thief when he was browsing the museum bottles, and it sure looked like he was looking for something valuable to steal. But maybe he just grabbed the flashiest bottle because that was the one that stood out, and all he really wanted from it was a drink.

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