The world’s largest wine collection is in Italy
The world’s largest wine collection, La Collezione del Madre, can be found in Verona, Italy. Located inside a monastery that has been turned into a museum and hotel, the La Collezione houses over 1 million bottles of wine from all over Europe and around the world.
The most prized wines are housed on shelves built with gold leaf; others are packed away in crates or barrels. Despite its size, the collection is still growing as it continues to purchase new wines for tasting and preservation. At this time, there are no plans to open other locations outside of Verona due to security concerns, but there have been talks about opening another location in Venice.
Although housed in Italy, the collection was started by an American, Bill Koch, who visited Verona on his honeymoon and fell in love with the city. He began buying wines there starting in 1985 and has continued since then to grow it into what it is today. The wine museum opened in 2003 and now receives over 1 million visitors a year. One hundred thousand of those visitors are from the United States.
The wines in the collection range in price from a few dollars to a fine bottle selling for over $1,000,000. The oldest vintage wine is an 1860 Château Lafite Rothschild Bordeaux that was given as a wedding gift to Czar Alexander II.
