At an auction in New York recently, a bottle of Romanée-Conti 1945 from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (DRC) sold for a whopping $812,500 (about €750,000). This makes it the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold at auction.
Ingrid Larmoyeur (Wine Institute) | Image: Unsplash
The 1945 vintage is legendary. It was the last vintage before the Romanée-Conti vineyard was replanted. Only about 600 bottles were produced that year. These 1945 wines are extremely powerful and complex. And this bottle is also in excellent condition. That extreme scarcity, combined with the domain's almost mythical reputation, makes such bottles particularly sought-after by collectors.
Fine wines
Remarkably, this news comes at a time when the market for so-called fine wines has been cooling somewhat recently. Back in January, we wrote that the Liv-ex Fine Wine 100 index was showing falling prices and that wine seemed to be losing popularity as an investment.
These kinds of record sales show that there are actually two worlds. The broader market for investment wines may fluctuate, but different rules apply to the most iconic bottles: scarcity, prestige and history.
For most wine lovers, such a bottle remains unattainable, of course. But it does illustrate how special wine can be: sometimes a bottle is not just a drink, but a piece of culture as well as a precious collector's item
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