Free the Goldman Sachs Wine Thief

Another great injustice has befallen the world: Nicolas De-Metyer, the former personal assistant to Goldman Sachs president David Solomon, has been charged with stealing $1.2 million in wine from his boss, an objectively funny and cool thing to do.

Solomon became president of Goldman in 2016 when his predecessor, Gary Cohn, left the company to join the Trump administration. According to Bloomberg, Solomon is “a double-black-diamond skier and wine collector who earned the title of Mr. Gourmet 2010 from the Society of Bacchus America.” I have no idea what any of that means, but last year, he sold his Aspen home for $36 million—possibly to fund his insanely expensive wine tastes, like Bleeding Gums Murphy and his Faberge egg habit.

De-Meyer allegedly began stealing the wine in 2014 and wasn’t discovered until October 2016, which makes one wonder just how much Solomon actually needed or used that wine. In fact, CNBC reports that the timing corresponds with the sale of Solomon’s 5400 square-foot apartment, which had a “1,000-bottle wine storage area,” implying he didn’t even know wine was missing until he packed up his apartment to leave. Relatable.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the wine in question is very, very posh:

The wine in question includes bottles from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, an estate in Burgundy, France, court documents show. These wines are “among the best, most expensive and rarest wines in the world,” according to prosecutors.

[…]

Domaine de la Romanée-Conti’s wines are considered the pinnacle of the wine world, said Ian Dorin, Heritage Auctions’s director of fine wine in New York. The best vintages can last for a hundred years, he said. “It’s a wine you can buy and then can sell six months later and make money on,” he added. “It’s the wine that wine lovers want to own.”

What is the point of wine that is so expensive you can’t even drink it? That’s no longer wine. That’s just another asset, like owning Apple stock. If you already have so much money, why not do something fun for once and drink the damn wine? At this point, this dude could probably use the wine to make sangria or cook a pot roast and it wouldn’t matter.

I applaud the wine thief for liberating that useless wine, though I disapprove of his decision to merely sell it rather than pour it into the streets or, better still, serve it to his boss and tell him he bought it at Trader Joe’s just to fuck with him. Still, it is a radical act of wine liberation. The next step is to take that stupid dusty old wine and redistribute it to the poor. Let them drink it like the blood of the wealthy.