A couple of follow ups to yesterday’s post on the Boston Bruins Stanley Cup celebrations.
Firstly, Jason Gay provides more details in today’s WSJ on the bubbly being sipped from the iconic Cup at last Saturday's soiree:
And don't give us any nonsense about The New Austerity, because this is now mandatory championship-afterparty behavior. In the past couple of weeks, your NHL Stanley Cup winning Boston Bruins and your NBA kingpin Dallas Mavericks both celebrated their titles at nightclubs by slurping from decadent bottles of champagne. Like white-tigers-eating-caviar-out-of Fabergé-eggs decadent. According to reports, the Mavericks drank from a 15-liter bottle that cost $90,000. The Bruins sipped a 30-liter bottle that cost $100,000. (The Boston Bruins: your cost-conscious bulk-buying luxury-champagne shoppers!)
Both bottles were made by a company called Armand de Brignac. The French brand has been featured in gossip items and music videos before—New Jersey Net stakeholder Jay-Z is an Armand de Brignac connoisseur. Nicknamed the "Ace of Spades" because of its label, the bubbly is known for its hand-made, metallic-finish bottles.
The Bruins shared an Ace of Spades big gulp—known as a "Midas"—that's the equivalent of 40 regular-earthling-sized bottles. The thing is crazy. Only six of them have been made. It weighs roughly 100 pounds and looks like C3PO after 18 months at Gold's Gym. It's the only bottle of champagne that can stand eye to eye with the actual Stanley Cup, which it did Saturday at the Shrine nightclub at the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut.
The Bruins have gotten a lot of attention for their Last-Night-On-Earth-style bar tab at Shrine, which totaled $156,000 and included 136 Bud Lights, 35 Jäger bombs, 67 bottled waters and one very lonely $6 Corona.
But the Bruins didn't actually buy their Ace of Spades. Shrine's owners did. The club is tight with the Bruins, and when partners learned the team was coming to celebrate after its Boston parade, they decided to spring for a gift, said Randy Greenstein, one of the owners. A warm case of PBR would not suffice.
Add the $100K bottle of bubbly to the $156K bar tab and you’ve got quite the little celebration there.
Secondly, those who questioned the relevance of my Whitey Bulger reference in the post and haven’t been paying attention may not have heard last night’s news that famed crime boss James Whitey Bulger was arrested in Santa Monica:
Legendary Boston crime boss James "Whitey" Bulger, who has been on the run for more than a decade, was arrested Wednesday in Santa Monica, multiple law enforcement sources told The Times.
Bulger, 81, has been the subject of several books and was the inspiration for "The Departed," a 2006 Martin Scorsese film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and Jack Nicholson.
Bulger fled Boston in late 1994 as federal agents were about to arrest him in connection with 21 killings, racketeering and other crimes that spanned the early 1970s to the mid-1980s.
Fraters Libertas: bringing you tomorrow’s top references today.
