(WineSpectator) - For eight months, 79,000 bottles of wine have sat in the warehouse behind bankrupt California retailer Premier Cru, sequestered by court order. Now the wine has been sold, bringing resolution closer for thousands of angry customers. Unfortunately, the sale will not pay them back much.

On Aug. 30, a trio of bidders vied to purchase the wine at an auction in an Oakland federal courtroom. The winning bid of $3.6 million was made by Spectrum, a California-based auction firm. That sum was well below the $5 million the bankruptcy trustee had once hoped to get for the wine, but $400,000 more than the initial bid. After expenses, the proceeds will be divided up among 4,450 former customers of Premier Cru. They will get pennies on the dollar.

"There've been a lot of dark days in this case when I thought I'd never get to sell this wine, but we are here today," said Mark Bostick, the trustee's lawyer, as he opened the auction.

Soon after Premier Cru's chapter 7 declaration in January, Bostick had asserted that under bankruptcy law, ownership of the wine had transferred to the debtor's estate. His intention was to sell it all on behalf of the unsecured creditors. That did not sit well with some disgruntled former customers who had received notification that their wine had arrived. They argued that title passed to them, even if they had yet to arrange for delivery.

For months, bankruptcy Judge William Lafferty put off deciding who had title to which wine. After intense mediation, an agreement was hammered out which allowed the trustee to sell most of the wine. Four customers opted to continue litigating for their wines. One was Ross Bott, a Silicon Valley tech guru, whose stash of 9,787 bottles was the largest belonging to any single customer. Bostick has warned that, in theory, at least, if no settlement can be reached with those four by the time the warehouse must be vacated this fall, their wine could be "abandoned."