Would you pay $30,000 for a bottle of wine?
Bordeaux is a world-class, world-famous wine region… With the price tags to prove it! Here’s a look at the 10 most expensive wines from Bordeaux… Including the most expensive wine in the world — and why it’s technically not a Bordeaux wine (even though it’s made there)…
Transcript:
00:00:00:00 – 00:00:20:13
Hello and welcome to your new Bonner Private Wines video where we learn about wines together on the channel, weekly. I’m your host, Julien Miquel, Bordeaux trained winemaker. Yes, I was trained and made wine in Bordeaux for a while. I know the area pretty well. And today I want to tell you about ten wonders of the world of wine.
00:00:20:13 – 00:00:48:15
There might be actually 11 or 12 that I mentioned in the video, the dozen most prestigious wines from the illustrious Bordeaux region in France, the most expensive Bordeaux that you can buy today will find out that a few of them you may have never heard about before. In fact, I’m pretty sure. And at the end of the video, I will even go as far as telling you about the most expensive wine produced in the Bordeaux region.
00:00:48:17 – 00:01:14:02
Astronomical prices, and why it doesn’t quite qualify as a genuine Bordeaux. Anyways. We do have a lot to cover, so let’s go.
00:01:14:04 – 00:01:34:14
Here, I want to give you the names of all ten most expensive Bordeaux wines and their prices, but also a little bit of the big picture. So it’s not just a list of ten wines. So, you know, what are the best Bordeaux areas? And also, I want you to get the types of wines that are the most expensive and understand why this is as well.
00:01:34:14 – 00:02:02:04
Basically all the most expensive Bordeaux’s are Pomerol wines on the right bank. Then you have the chateaux of the 1855 classification of Medoc. So the left bank this time, and then surprisingly, the cheapest most expensive wines, if we can call them that, are from Saint-Emilion. Let’s explain.
00:02:02:06 – 00:02:29:13
Let’s go from the priciest to the least expensive. Out of the five most expensive Bordeaux wines, four are from Pomerol. The small, deep clay appellation on the right bank that cultivates mainly 100% Merlot wines. At the very top is the industry’s Petrus, which is not a chateau. It’s just called Petrus, not Chateau Petrus, and it sells for about $4,500 a bottle on average.
00:02:29:13 – 00:03:06:12
By the way, the prices that I mentioned here are global averages across all vintages, as analyzed by Wine Searcher, which is the biggest wine retail database and website. So the most reliable source for this, which I happened to work for at some point in my career as well, but that’s a different story. You can find those wines for cheaper Than the prices I’m going to give you then this average, if you buy a lesser and more recent vintage, or they can cost a lot more if you take a very old and exceptional vintage, like in 1945 or 61, an 82 and so on.
00:03:06:12 – 00:03:29:24
So those are just the average prices across all vintages for those bottles. Petrus is the icon and the cult wine in Bordeaux, made in very small quantity and incredibly age worthy. So it’s no surprise to see it here at the very top. Second is a neighbor, Chateau Le Pin, a similar tiny winery that makes outstanding wine. Probably just as good as Petrus,
00:03:30:00 – 00:03:52:13
but Le Pin’s fame is a little more recent as it came to the forefront of its glory primarily during the Robert Parker era, since the 1980s and even later. By the way, I have an excellent video about the influence of Robert Parker here that you can watch after. Le Pin sells for around $4,000 a bottle. The third most expensive Bordeaux,
00:03:52:13 – 00:04:16:20
it’s quite obscure, I believe it’s made by Petrus, but there’s hardly any information about it online. It’s called Saute-Loup Reserve de la Famille. So a family reserve of some sort. Apparently only made in a handful of vintages. So really rare wine at $1,700 a bottle, we’re dropping quite a bit here, at fourth place is finally a wine that is not from Pomerol, but Saint-Emilion.
00:04:16:20 – 00:04:41:22
A wine called Hommage à Elisabeth Bouchet, made by famous Chateau Angelus winery in Saint-Emilion at $1,600 a bottle. But this is not the main wine by this winery. This is a special cuvee that they make every few years when the conditions are exceptional, and from a tiny, single, very old vineyard 80 plus years old, I believe. So it’s a bit of an exception.
00:04:41:22 – 00:05:15:18
A specialty wine made only since the vintage 2016. Finally, the fifth most expensive Bordeaux is Chateau LaFleur, also in Pomerol, another local icon, somewhat similar to Petrus and Le Pin, but just a bit less iconic. At around 1800. No $1,080 a bottle. After this, we’re entering the cheap wine territory. Wines below $1,000 a bottle.
00:05:15:20 – 00:05:55:23
And from here, you might start recognizing more and more familiar names names of those chateaux that also famous globally that every wine connoisseur has heard about and would love to taste one day or every day. Why not? And that’s because those are all the chateaus classified in Napoleon’s famous 1855 classification of the wines of Medoc. Names like Chateau Lafite-Rothschild that you can get your hands on for a mere $980 a bottle, or Chateau Haut-Brion, whose white wine, the only Bordeaux white on this list, is pricier than the red because it’s rarer but yet exceptional.
00:05:56:00 – 00:06:19:11
At around $930 a bottle, or Chateau Latour, in Pauillac, one of the most illustrious, even at $820. You can learn more about Pauillac, by the way, in this video here. And Chateau Margaux finally at seven, this bottle is a 79 Chateau Margaux that I enjoyed a while ago at $790 a bottle. I also made a video about Margaux right here.
00:06:19:13 – 00:06:49:16
So why are these chateaus that are arguably more famous globally than the wineries actually less expensive? Well, it’s simple. It’s scarcity bit, which doesn’t say exactly how many bottles they made they make every year. But we know that it’s probably around 30,000 bottles flasks every vintage. The large chateaux of Medoc, like Lafite and Margaux and Haut-Brion and even Mouton Rothschild produce something like three times this amount.
00:06:49:18 – 00:07:24:00
And their Grand Vin or the first wine they make 100,000 bottles also, and they make even more of the second wine. So they are more famous because there’s more of it, but they’re also cheaper. They have large vineyard areas, while the Pomerol appellations, is very tiny. And wineries, they are all very small. On top of that, Pomerol wines are probably even denser in tannins, being made from 100% Merlot on these exceptionally deep clay surface, and they of they can age for ever, for decades.
00:07:24:00 – 00:07:42:04
They’re incredibly ageworthy, the even more than the 1855 chateau wines, hence them commanding higher prices among collectors, especially for old vintages.
00:07:42:06 – 00:08:20:01
And finally, at 10th and 11th place in this ranking are the two top centennial producers. The only two wineries that were classified as premier Grand Cru classé in the A category for a long time, namely Chateau Cheval Blanc and Chateau Ausone, both selling at around $770 a bottle. They are without a doubt the best Saint-Emilions that you can buy, except maybe that special Hommage cuvee by Angelus that we mentioned before, the ones with the most history of astronomical exceptional quality.
00:08:20:01 – 00:09:07:15
And I’ll make a video about Saint-Emilion specifically very soon in our Bordeaux wine appellation series that we’ve been continuing for a while. So make sure to stay tuned and subscribe with notifications on not to miss any new upload. And finally, as promised, there is the most expensive wine made in Bordeaux. But that is not a Bordeaux wine. It’s called Liber Pater, whose older vintages like 2009 or 2010 sell for about $4,000 a pop, while the most recent ones, like 2015, exceptional vintage, bear a $30,000 price tag for a bottle, making it is the most expensive wine pretty much in the world.
00:09:07:15 – 00:09:34:04
This wine gained a solid recognition over the past decade or two as exactly that, the most expensive wine in the world. That’s what it’s kind of famous for, but it’s a tiny project in the south of Bordeaux, where a small wine grower, Louis Muskie, makes wine from ungrafted vines that extremely dense vine densities or really compact vineyards. Essentially, as he puts it, the way Napoleon’s era wines were made.
00:09:34:04 – 00:10:04:12
So perhaps the wine gets the genuine taste of Bordeaux wine as it was, or if they were circa 1855. The problem is, because it’s not made with the same techniques and grapes that today would grant you the Bordeaux appellation, well, it is not officially recognized as a Bordeaux wine. It bears the vin de France appellation or wine of France, with no official designation of origin except from France.
00:10:04:14 – 00:10:23:17
And now you know about it too. Here are more videos to keep learning more about wine. Don’t forget to like and subscribe to help us make more of these videos. My video about Pauillac right here and Margaux here, and the most expensive Spanish wine there too as well. Keep watching and I will see you soon in the wonderful world of wine.
00:10:23:19 – 00:10:30:13
Cheers.
