John Kapon knew that the bottle of 1945 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti up for sale at his New-York based wine seller’s auction last month was going to do well. After all, it was one of only 600 bottles of the burgundy produced in a year marked in history as end of World War II, and considered one the greatest vintages of all time.
Still, it was a little shocking when the bottle sold for $812,500—setting a new world record for a bottle of wine sold at auction at nearly 50% more than the record price that same bottle had fetched in 2018. “Scarcity really drives the bus,” says Kapon. “When it comes to really rare, and really old wines among the greatest, people don’t really care what they pay for it.”
Wines are not the only category of collectible items seeing a surge in value at auction. Last month, the 1969 black Fender Stratocaster guitar that Pink Floyd member David Gilmour played on that band’s most iconic albums, including “Dark Side of the Moon,” went for $14.55 million at a Christie’s auction. That was more than double the $6 million record set in 2020 for a guitar, a 1959 Martin D-18E that Kurt Cobain played in Nirvana’s “MTV Unplugged” performance decades earlier. Only weeks before that, a rare Pokémon Pikachu Illustrator card, one of just 29 created for a competition in the 1990’s, was sold by influencer and wrestler Logan Paul for $16.5 billion—triple what he paid for it in 2021.
What those items have in common is they are very rare, one-of-a-kind items that also tell a story. In the case of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, with the passage of time, fewer and fewer bottles of the wine have become available, with perhaps only a handful left, estimates Kapon.
Acker’s Fine and Rare index, which tracks a cross-section of 100 top wines sold at the auction, rose 11% in the first three months of the year, one of the strongest jumps he’s seen in 25 years. Other collectibles are seeing effervescence at their higher end: TCGplayer, a platform owned by eBay for trading cards of all kinds, said it saw double‑ and triple‑digit percentage gains on many rarer cards in 2025. And the online music instrument marketplace Reverb found that in 2025, the overall values of an array of quality vintage instruments, not just the multimillion-dollar headline grabbing ones, had risen by 10% to 30% last year, with the rarer models fetching the biggest increases. The market for unique collectables stands in contrast to a slower-growing art market: The recent Art Basel and UBS Art Market report found the sector grew by a modest 4% last year, after a couple of years of declines.
Collecting prized and special objects is nothing new, of course. And it’s not just rarity that drives up prices at auction. It’s often a story that makes something a one-of-a-kind item—and therefore valuable. Of the Gilmour guitar, Christie’s Nathalie Ferneau explained, “It sort of became this mythical holy grail object.” The instrument was part of a Christie’s auction of the collection of Jim Irsay, a billionaire who had owned the Indiana Colts football team. The auction yielded over $84 million in sales from 44 items, setting 23 world records.
The guitar was modified by Gilmour himself, who changed the neck multiple times and drilled holes into it. Such changes would typically dent the value of an instrument, but not in this case, since the modifications show it was a guitar Gilmour himself tailored to get the sound he wanted on those classic albums. “For a true fan, that makes it all the more desirable,” says Ferneau.
In the case of the Pokémon card, much of its value stemmed from its pristine, original condition, certified by an authentication agency. It helped that Paul sweetened the pot by selling the card inside a custom necklace he wore, and that he would hand-deliver it to the winner.
Not every valuable collectible item is meant to be put in a display case or resold. Wine, for example, is meant for drinking. Similarly, guitar collectors like to get together with friends and actually play their prized possessions, rather than treat a multi-million dollar guitar like a Monet painting. “It’s a great conversation piece,” says Martin Nolan, executive director of auction house Julien’s, which in 2015 sold the first guitar to fetch $1 million.
Another possible factor in the rise of collectables: Truly unique pieces are a chance for the ultra-wealthy to flex amid the sea of sameness in high-end personal goods. “Traditional luxury goods are losing their luster,” says Columbia Business School marketing professor and former LVMH executive Silvia Bellezza. “The 1% disengages from this type of good, and so what do they do next? They’re not going to stop signaling. They’re going to do it in a more sophisticated way.”
