World's
Most Expensive Wines
provided by Forbes
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When
an enterprising young man named James Christie opened
his sales rooms in London in December 1766, his first
auction consisted of the estate of a "deceased
nobleman" containing "a large Quantity of
Madeira and high Flavour'd Claret." The records
don't relate how much these delightfully described
"high Flavour'd clarets" fetched but as the
whole sale realized a grand total £175, it is a sure
bet that if Christie had known that two hundred years
later, in 1985, his now famous auction house would sell one
bottle of wine for £105,000, or $160,000, he might
have held back a bottle or two to enrich his future
heirs.
This bottle was a Bordeaux, a
1787 Chateau Lafite, and, according to The Guinness
Book of World Records, 18 years later it still is
the world's most expensive bottle of wine. Its great age
alone would have ensured a good price but what gave it
its special cachet, especially to American collectors,
and ensured the record price tag were the initials Th.J.
etched in the glass.
The bottle had belonged to
Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United
States and one of the most revered of its founding
fathers. A philosopher, scientist and statesmen, the
aristocratic Jefferson was also an avid oenophile. When
he was ambassador to France he spent much of his time
visiting the vineyards of Bordeaux and Burgundy, buying
wine for his own collection and on behalf of his friends
back home. He is also associated with two other bottles
of very pricy wine, a 1775 Sherry ($43,500) and the most
expensive white wine ever sold, a 1787 Chateau d'Yquem
($56,588).
Of course none of these wines
are actually drinkable now; it is unusual for even the
best Bordeaux to last more than 50 years, and 200 years
is beyond any wine's limit. The allure of these
high-priced bottles of vinegar, and other wines of its
ilk, is purely in the joy of collecting, not consuming.
The 1787 Lafite was explicitly bought as a piece of
Jefferson memorabilia, not as a bottle of wine, and it
now resides in the Forbes Collection in New York. These
wines are rather like old stamps, something to be
collected, horded but never used, and they command such
high prices not because of their utility but because of
their scarcity and consequent appeal to collectors.
Compiling a list of the World's
Most Expensive Bottles of Wine is not as simple as it
might first appear. How do you compare the price paid
for a double magnum--that's four bottles--to a single
bottle? Do you rate them on the same scale or do you
divide the price of the big bottle by four in order to
determine its per-single bottle price?
So, rather than compiling a
league table we determined 11 separate categories, then
sought out the most expensive bottle in each category,
and a pretty interesting search it turned out to be. One
of the first things you'll notice is that all the wines
on the list were sold at auction, because, except in
rare occasions, the seller knows that the publicity
surrounding a special bottle, and the heated atmosphere
of competitive bidding, often results in even higher
prices.
The world's most expensive
bottle of wine that could actually be drunk today is
also the most expensive wine ever sold in America, a
Montrachet 1978 from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti that
was hammered down at Sotheby's in New York in
2001. The lot of seven bottles fetched $167,500, or
$23,929 per bottle. This is an extraordinary price for a
white wine, even in the rarified world of wine
collecting. What happened was that two avid collectors
were bidding against each other and got carried away,
each refusing to yield as the price rose through the
stratosphere.
Michael Broadbent, the
former head of Christie's wine department, relates a
similar story concerning the sale of the Jefferson
Lafite. As the bidding approached £100,000 for this
unique bottle, he changed bid steps, that is the amount
the bids increased by. One of the two remaining bidders
was Marvin Shanken, publisher of the Wine
Spectator, and according to Broadbent, he didn't
notice the change until, to his very obvious horror, he
realized that he had just offered to pay £100,000 for
one bottle of wine. As he sat there ashen faced a great
hush fell over the packed auction room as everyone
waited to see if the other bidder, Christopher Forbes,
would come back in. He eventually did, at £105,000,
much to Shanken's very palpable relief.
Then there is the strange case
of the most expensive bottle of wine never sold.
In 1989 William Sokolin, a New York wine merchant, had a
bottle of Chateau Margaux 1787, also with Jefferson's
initials, on consignment from its English owner. He was
asking $500,000 for it but had had no cash offers when
he took it along to a Chateau Margaux dinner at the Four
Seasons restaurant. (Why would it cost so much more than
the 1787 Lafite? It didn't cost more than the
Lafite, just that Sokolin was asking $500,000. I
don't think he expected to get this much and had had no
offers by the time of the accident. However, just by
asking such a huge sum he generated a lot of publicity,
which some people speculate was the whole point of the
exercise. He did however get $225,000 from the insurance
company which he claims, with some justification, makes
it the world's most expensive bottle, even if it was
never sold. Besides everything else it's a fun story
about a very expensive bottle however you rate it.)
At the end of the evening he
was getting ready to leave when a waiter carrying a
coffee tray bumped the bottle, breaking it. Luckily,
Sokolin had the foresight to insure his valuable vin,
and shared the $225,000 payout with the owner, which
makes this the world's most expensive broken
bottle of wine. History does not tell us what happened
to the unfortunate waiter.
What all these wines have in
common, whether it's the undrinkable 1787 Lafite or the
eminently drinkable 1945 Mouton, and what makes them
command such astronomic prices, is their scarcity value.
The world seems to have an
ever-increasing appetite for collecting unusual old
things, be they baseball cards, 1950s Formica furniture
or steam train memorabilia, and it's only natural that
rare wines are subject to this same collecting mania.
Now, with more and more people
discovering the pleasures of drinking wine, especially
the newly rich of China and East Asia, the prices of all
fine wines will continue to rise and it will only be a
matter of time before Mr. Jefferson's bottle, and
several others on our list, see their formally
eye-popping prices surpassed as ever richer and ever
more determined collectors compete for that one,
must-have bottle of wine.
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