The Cost of Prestigious Wines
Written By: Brian Freedman on Fri, Oct 26th 2007
There are some producers whose reputations so far exceed nearly everyone else's that you can almost justify spending any amount of money on one or two of their precious bottles. We all know their names—Petrus, Latour, Screaming Eagle—and in wine circles, they tend to be looked at as wholly different creatures than their more ordinary vinous counterparts.
And above them all, perhaps, is Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, the revered Burgundian producer that crafts what are widely considered to be the pinnacle of pinot noir's expression. All of its vineyards—whether wholly owned by the Domaine, like the revered Romanée-Conti monopole, or leased in part, like Echezeaux—are classified as grand cru, and its winemaking techniques are as legendarily simple as they are precise.
All this baggage comes at a price, though: At a recent auction held by Christie's, six bottles of the 1995 DRC Romanee-Conti sold for more than $50,000. So when I was recently presented with the opportunity to purchase a single bottle of the 2004 DRC Echezeaux for about the same price as a one-way ticket from Philly to LA, I jumped on it. As expensive as these wines are, they are even more difficult to find outside the auction house or high-end wine lists in the first place—at least on the budget of a mere working stiff.
This was not a decision I made lightly: I have a monthly wine budget, and I've lately been spending most of it on all those fabulous 2005 Rhones that have been hitting wine-shop shelves. The 2005's from Chateauneuf-du-Pape should last a long time if stored properly, and the prices are beyond reasonable, even for the best producers. So blowing it all on a single bottle of pinot was a big decision.
The question, then, is this: Is a single bottle—especially one that you've never tasted before—ever worth spending all that hard-earned money on?
I would make the argument that it is, though with the caveat that the expenditure has to be within reason. Determining what reasonable means, of course, is a personal decision, based just as much on what you can justify as it is on how much money you make. It's also determined by what you plan to do with the bottle: Buying with intention of selling it later on for a profit is one thing, but spending all that dough on 750 milliliters of juice to be consumed is another.
Or maybe, of course, it's not. Because if drinking that bottle gives you pleasure, and if you think that spending a few hundred dollars will justify that pleasure, then by all means go for it. No one can tell you what kind of dollar figure to put on the value of experience.
There's one other factor you have to take into consideration, too: The sky-rocketing cost of the most prestigious wines. First Growth Bordeaux, for example, is increasingly unaffordable for all but the wealthiest collectors. And the most prestigious bottlings of the most highly regarded producers are downright stratospheric. The 2004 DRC Romanee-Conti, for example, would have cost me nearly $2,000 for a single bottle, and that's a price I can neither justify nor afford.
The bottle of Echezeaux currently residing in my cellar, however, cost nowhere near that much. It wasn't cheap, mind you, but it was, after much consideration, within the parameters of what I'd consider reasonable. After all, I went in on the bottle with my father, who's just as much of a wine lover as me. (In fact, he's the reason I work in this field in the first place.) We plan on finding a Saturday afternoon in the next few weeks to get together and pop the cork on the bottle. I'll saute some mushrooms and rosemary, spoon it over warm slices of baguette, decant the wine for an hour or so, and share a legendary wine with my father while hopefully watching Penn State win for a change.
The memories of doing that, I suspect, will be far more valuable than what we paid for the wine. And the wine, if what I'm told is correct, will be absolutely spectacular.
It sounds like a good purchase to me.
