FIGURES THAT MAKE YOU DIZZY
This was a landmark sale, as the amount for which the bottle was sold is so dizzying: 558,000 dollars including all taxes. Sotheby's, which organised the sale in New York in October 2018, had set the upper limit of the estimate at... 32,000 dollars. That is 17 times less than the final price paid by the winning bidder. How to justify such a craze, such madness for some? Prestige and rarity, quite simply. The Domaine de la Romanée Conti is still considered the most prestigious wine in the world. It is also one of the rarest. In this case, the 1945 vintage in question is from a production of 600 bottles made just before the Domaine pulled up the vines and replanted them. A second, identical bottle was sold for $496,000 at the same auction - just minutes after the first.
END OF A REIGN: BURGUNDY DETHRONES BORDEAUX
A small revolution is taking place in this category of the most expensive wine in the world. For a long time, it was wines from Bordeaux that held this prestigious title. Until this sale, the most expensive bottle in the world had been sold at a similar auction in Hong Kong on 28 October 2010. It was a lot of three bottles of Chateau Lafite Rotschild 1869 that attracted the envy of many buyers. The final amount that won the auction: $233,000 per bottle. The new record set by the 1945 vintage of Domaine de la Romanée Conti even surpasses the larger sizes. Up until then, a 3-litre jeroboam of Mouton-Rothschild (Bordeaux), 1945 vintage, was the reference in this field. It sold for $310,700 at an auction in New York.
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