THE CURIOUS QUAFFER
THE SKY’S THE LIMIT
How expensive can a bottle of wine be? Generally speaking the
most expensive wines on sale today, although often very hard to
find, are those from Burgundy, from the most prestigious Bordeaux
properties, Sweet Mosel Riesling wines and Napa Valley reds.
If we take a look at the wine-searcher ‘most expensive wines’ database
you will discover that the average price (i.e. so for some vintages much
more) for a single bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti’s ‘Romanée-
Conti ’ is $20,405; for Domaine Leroy’s ‘Musigny Grand Cru’ $15,680;
for Egon Muller’s ‘Scharzhofberger Riesling Trockenbeerenauslese
$13,558; for Domaine Georges & Christophe Roumier’s ‘Musigny
Grand Cru’ $13,050 – the list goes on. Big money! For those with the
money to buy them there are, therefore, a number of very prestigious,
and very expensive, wines to buy. But it is at auctions that we find the
most expensive of the expensive:
Domaine de la Romanée-Conti ‘Romanée-Conti’ (1945) - In
October 2018 two standard 75cl bottles of this wine were sold at
auction by Sotheby’s in New York. The hammer for the first came
down at $558,000, setting a new world record, quickly followed by
the second at $496,000. The original estimate was $32,000 for each! In
today’s terms, with sterling struggling, that equates to somewhere in
the region of £455,000 and £405,000 a bottle. Assuming that a standard
bottle of wine holds five glasses of wine (each one holding five fluid
ounces) – then £91,000 and £81,000 a glass!!
Why so much? Firstly, the name of the estate, the vineyard and the
wine itself are all iconic the world over - the crème de la crème in the
world of wine. The vineyard itself is a single 4.47 acre plot planted with
the pinot noir grape. It nestles in the tiny, beautiful, village of Vosne
Romanée just outside Beaune. You can visit the vineyard, as I have, and
will discover that it is not fancy and looks, to the naked eye, like many
of the other vineyards in the area.
38 wirrallife.com
Secondly the 1945 vintage in Burgundy was a legendary one. A stellar
and, some would say, the perfect vintage. Thirdly only 600 bottles of
the wine were produced. The harvest tied in with the end of WWII
in September 1945, following which the vines were pulled up and
replaced. The next vintage of the wine was not then produced until
1952. Fourthly, over many years, the 600 bottles of the perfect wine,
from one of the greatest estates and from one of the best wine producers
in the world, started to gradually disappear (after being consumed no
doubt). We end up with what is known in wine circles as a ‘unicorn
wine’ (like the mythical unicorn, they are extremely rare and hard to
find). By 2018 it had become super scarce - a real collector’s item, an
icon and something that either very few people, or possibly nobody,
would ever be likely to get their hands on again. Finally provenance
– a huge issue in the world of fine wine today, particularly with wine
fraud on the increase. Here the wines on sale were from the private
cellar of the famous Robert Drouhin. Immaculate provenance for an
iconic ‘unicorn’ wine. To cap it all, shortly after the two bottles were
sold, three bottles of 1937 Romanée-Conti were then sold for $930,000
($310,000 a bottle). Not a bad day for everyone involved, I guess?
Château Cheval Blanc (1947) - This wine was auctioned in 2010 by
Christie’s and was considered by many to be one of the best wines
ever made. It was purchased by an anonymous private collector for
$304,375. The bottle was a very rare Imperial (otherwise known as a
Methuselah - a six litre bottle) and therefore the equivalent of eight
standard bottles (so effectively $38,046.87 per standard bottle).
Notwithstanding it, at the time, set a new world record for a single
bottle of wine sold at auction. Yet again it was a very old vintage and a
very rare wine from one of the most prestigious wineries in the world.
The properties own website probably can’t be improved here: “1947
is considered a miraculous vintage, the greatest Cheval Blanc of the
20th century. It is both very powerful and extremely well-balanced.
Due to its high percentage of alcohol, combined with some residual