$55,100
The top lot of a Sotheby’s London wine sale in January contained 12 bottles of Château Pétrus 1982 and sold for a considerably higher price than its presale estimate of $44,700. Other highlights of the sale included lots containing three bottles of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti 2005 ($34,900), 12 bottles of Château Ausone 2000 ($24,800), and 12 bottles of Château Lafite 2000 ($23,000).

$1 MILLION
The highest bid at RM Auctions’ Automobiles of Arizona event in January in Phoenix was cast for a 1963 Aston Martin DB4 GT. Aston Martin built only 75 DB4 GTs—the competition version of the DB4—during the car’s production run, from 1959 to 1963. (Zagato built the bodies for another 19 examples.) Roy Salvadori, Stirling Moss, Jim Clark, and Innes Ireland all raced in DB4 GTs. The car that sold at the RM auction, chassis number 0175/L, was the last DB4 GT built and sold by Aston’s Newport Pagnell factory.

The car’s fourth owner, a Californian named Boone Crowe, drove it in numerous vintage racing events in the 1980s until he crashed 0175/L at Laguna Seca and damaged its nose. The car remained out of service until Crowe’s death a few years later. His widow eventually sent the car to a shop in Utah to be repaired and restored, but the work was never completed.

In 1994, Crowe’s widow sold the partially disassembled GT to a vintage racer in California, who had it fully restored and prepared for competition. He and the next owner raced the car throughout the 1990s, until the latter sold it to its last owner, who kept the GT in climate-controlled storage.

A 1967 Shelby 427 Cobra that formerly belonged to noted car collector Otis Chandler garnered the second-highest price during RM’s Arizona event. The car sold for $632,500.

The Cobra was first modified and restored in 1976, then again in 1979, and once more in the early 1980s, the last time by Colorado’s Bill Murray (the renowned Cobra expert and restorer, not the actor).

Chandler, the late publisher of the Los Angeles Times, acquired the Cobra in 1987 for his Chandler Vintage Museum of Transportation and Wildlife in Oxnard, Calif. There, he added the Cobra to what already was considered one of the world’s premier collections of muscle cars. Chandler owned the car for nearly 20 years before it was acquired by its last owner, a Texan who sold it in a condition nearly identical to the way it was restored by Murray.

$5.9 MILLION
An early-18th-century silver punch bowl made by silversmith Cornelius Kierstede sold for a record-setting price at a Sotheby’s New York auction in January. The price paid for the bowl, which Kierstede made sometime between 1700 and 1710 in New York, is more than seven times the previous record for an American silver item and is the second-highest price ever paid for any piece of silver at auction. The previous auction record for American silver was $775,750. It was held by two different items: a circa 1660 wine cup that sold at a Sotheby’s sale in 2001 and a circa 1715 two-handled grace cup and cover that sold at a 2002 Sotheby’s sale.

The punch bowl, which had a presale estimate of only $400,000 to $800,000, belonged to British commodore Joshua Loring, who abandoned his home in Massachusetts during the Revolutionary War and fled to London. According to legend, the bowl was hidden in a well on Loring’s Massachusetts property during the war and then retrieved and brought to Loring in England. It remained with Loring’s descendants in England, in relative anonymity, for the next 230 years.

$671,000
At the annual Barrett-Jackson collector car auction in Scottsdale, Ariz., in January, a plane—not a car—received the highest bid. The 1929 Hamilton Metalplane H-47, one of only 29 H-47 planes manufactured, is the only airworthy example still in existence. The Hamilton Metalplane Co. in Milwaukee, Wis., a division of Boeing, manufactured the plane.

Restored over a three-year period from 1972 through 1975, the H-47 has been inspected and certified airworthy annually since then. The plane has about 5,200 flight hours.

The highest-priced car at the Barrett-Jackson sale was a 1964 Shelby Cobra, which drew a bid of $478,500. According to the Shelby American World Registry, the Cobra, chassis number CSX2281, was delivered new to the Moore Ford Co. of North Little Rock, Ark., with a retail price of $5,691.

The car underwent a frame-off restoration in 1990, and more recently its engine, transmission, and supercharger were rebuilt. The Cobra has been entered in several concours events, and it has completed a number of road rallies, including the Copperstate 1000 in 2001 and 2002 and the Barrett-Jackson Desert Classic in 2000 and 2001.

$20,740
The turquoise-colored T-shirt that Michael Jackson wore under his red leather jacket in the "Beat It" video fetched the highest price of all the King of Pop’s personal items auctioned at a Bonhams & Butterfields entertainment industry memorabilia sale in December in Los Angeles.

Other Jackson-related highlights included an autographed Thriller CD ($4,880); a custom-made area rug depicting Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley that was given to the couple as a wedding gift ($3,660); a signed, limited-edition print by Brett-Livingstone Strong depicting Jackson in a Renaissance-era setting ($4,575); and a signed portrait of Jackson drawn by a high school–age fan in 1980 ($5,185).

The sale also featured items related to Marilyn Monroe and the famed Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood, as well as movie posters and vintage animation celluloids. The celluloids included one from Walt Disney’s Pinocchio ($20,740) and another from Sleeping Beauty ($15,860).

One of the auction’s surprises was the price paid for a collection of rare Tom and Jerry one-sheet movie posters from the 1940s and ’50s. The lot’s presale estimate was $400 to $500, and the final bid was $17,080.

$3.74 MILLION
A 1956 Jaguar D-Type sports racer was the top seller at Gooding & Co.’s Scottsdale Auction in January in Arizona. The car has an impressive racing history in the United States. From 1956 through ’58 it was driven to top-three finishes in at least nine races in California and finished first in four races, including the 1958 Pomona Six-Hour Enduro. That performance is considered the last significant victory in the United States for a D-Type.

A 1959 Ferrari 250 GT Series 1 cabriolet netted the second-highest price—$2.145 million—at the Gooding & Co. auction. From 1956 through 1959, Pinin Farina created just 40 examples of this sports car, each of which differs from the others in chassis specification, interior appointments, exterior details, and color combinations.

When new, the cabriolet was one of the most expensive automobiles on the market. With a list price of $14,950, the car cost $3,000 more than a Ferrari California Spyder and $2,500 more than a competition Berlinetta. This Series 1 cabriolet was displayed at the New York Auto Show in 1959, alongside a California Spyder and a Testa Rossa.