A word on what this list is
Every wine below is here because it changed something, or because it defines a place so completely that the place is now described in its terms. Not because it is expensive. The expense is a consequence, and in several cases a fairly recent one.
It is worth being honest about the shape of the thing. Seven of the twenty-five are from Burgundy and nine from Bordeaux, and that is not chauvinism, it is arithmetic. Those two regions invented the idea that a specific patch of ground could be worth more than the wine made from it, and the global market still prices everything else against them. I have argued the case for the rest of the world at the end, where it belongs, in the open.
These are not the twenty-five most expensive wines. They are the twenty-five that mattered, and the prices followed.
About the prices
Figures are the global average retail price for a standard 750ml bottle, drawn from Wine-Searcher where I could verify them. Read them as the middle of a very wide river. A great vintage of any of these can trade at three or four times the average, a weak one at half. Older bottles with provenance go somewhere else entirely, which is what auction rooms are for. Where I could not verify a precise figure I have given a range and said so.
One further caveat that applies to all of it. The prices below are what the market charges. They are not what the wine is worth to drink, and past about the third entry the two numbers stop being related in any way you could defend at dinner.
Burgundy
1. Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Romanée-Conti Grand Cru
Vosne-Romanée, Côte de Nuits · around $28,000 a bottle
The most famous 1.81 hectares on earth. A walled monopole in Vosne-Romanée that has been recognised as exceptional since the monks of Saint-Vivant worked it in the Middle Ages, and which in 1760 became the object of a bidding war between the Prince de Conti and Madame de Pompadour. The Prince won, gave the vineyard his name, and reportedly kept every bottle for himself.
Roughly five thousand bottles exist in a good year, and the domaine sells them only in mixed cases, so acquiring one legitimately means buying eleven other grand crus you did not ask for. The vineyard was pulled up in 1945 rather than surrender to phylloxera and did not produce again until 1952. What is in the glass, when you finally get there, is not power. It is length and lift and a kind of transparency that no other Pinot Noir manages, and it goes on for a full minute after you swallow.
2. Domaine Leroy, Musigny Grand Cru
Chambolle-Musigny · around $50,000 a bottle, the most expensive wine in the world
Lalou Bize-Leroy co-directed the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti until 1992, left after a falling-out, and proceeded to build a rival on her own terms. She had bought Domaine Leroy in 1988 and converted it to biodynamics immediately, at a time when the word got you laughed out of the Côte d’Or, and she crops at yields so low they look like a misprint.
Her holding in Musigny is roughly a quarter of a hectare. The output is measured in a couple of barrels. It is now, by average price, the most expensive wine on the planet, having risen twenty-nine percent in a single year, and it is the clearest case in wine of one person’s conviction being worth more than any chateau.
3. Georges Roumier, Musigny Grand Cru
Chambolle-Musigny · around $21,500 a bottle
The same vineyard, a different hand, and an even smaller parcel. Christophe Roumier farms about a tenth of a hectare of Musigny, which yields somewhere near three hundred bottles a year. Three hundred. For the entire world.
The domaine has been in Chambolle since 1924 and Roumier is generally regarded, by other winemakers, as the finest technician in Burgundy. His Musigny is the standard by which the appellation’s claim to be the most graceful red wine in existence is judged. The scarcity is not marketing. There simply is not any more of it.
4. Henri Jayer, Cros Parantoux
Vosne-Romanée Premier Cru · commonly $15,000 and up
The most romantic entry on the list, and the only one whose maker is gone. Cros Parantoux was a scrubby plot above Richebourg that had been given over to Jerusalem artichokes during the war. Henri Jayer cleared it with dynamite from 1951 onward, believing there was something underneath, and he was right.
Jayer made his last vintage in 2001 and died in 2006, so the supply is finite and shrinking by the bottle. He is the man who taught modern Burgundy cold maceration, minimal handling and a fanatical attention to fruit selection, and half the great growers of the region will tell you they learned from him. The wine is a premier cru that outprices almost every grand cru in France.
5. Domaine Armand Rousseau, Chambertin Grand Cru
Gevrey-Chambertin · roughly $3,000 to $5,000 a bottle
Chambertin was Napoleon’s wine. He is said to have taken it on campaign and to have watered it, which tells you something about Napoleon. Armand Rousseau began estate-bottling in the 1930s, when almost everyone in Burgundy still sold in bulk to négociants, and that decision is a large part of why the region has a fine wine market at all.
The house style is structure without weight, and its Chambertin and Clos de Bèze are the two most reliably great bottles in Gevrey. If Romanée-Conti is about delicacy, this is Burgundy’s statement of force, and it ages for decades.
6. Domaine Coche-Dury, Corton-Charlemagne Grand Cru
Aloxe-Corton · roughly $6,000 to $8,000 a bottle
The white wine that other white winemakers talk about. Jean-François Coche-Dury, and now his son Raphaël, produce a Corton-Charlemagne in tiny volume that manages to be reductive, smoky and mineral in youth and then unfolds over twenty years into something no other Chardonnay does.
The hill it comes from is named for Charlemagne, who according to the story ordered white grapes planted there because red wine kept staining his beard. The domaine grants almost no allocations, does no publicity, and has never needed to.
7. Domaine Leflaive, Montrachet Grand Cru
Puligny-Montrachet · around $20,000 a bottle
Montrachet is simply the greatest site for Chardonnay in the world, and has been described that way in print since the eighteenth century. Alexandre Dumas wrote that it should be drunk kneeling and with the head uncovered, which is the sort of line that survives because it is only slightly excessive.
The Leflaive family has farmed Puligny since 1717. Anne-Claude Leflaive converted the domaine to biodynamics through the 1990s and made the case, more persuasively than anyone, that the method belonged at the very top of the quality pyramid rather than at its fringes. The domaine’s holding in Montrachet itself is a fraction of a hectare.
Bordeaux
8. Petrus
Pomerol · around $4,900 a bottle, the most expensive wine in Bordeaux
No chateau, no classification, no grand entrance. Petrus is a modest house on a low rise in Pomerol with roughly eleven and a half hectares around it, and the reason it commands what it does is a seam of blue-grey clay that sits under the vineyard and almost nowhere else.
It is essentially all Merlot, a grape treated as a supporting player everywhere else in the region. The Moueix family built its reputation from the 1940s onward, and its arrival in America is usually credited to Jackie Kennedy serving it at the White House. Pomerol was a backwater until Petrus decided it was not.
9. Le Pin
Pomerol · around $4,200 a bottle
The original garage wine, and proof that a great vineyard does not need a great history. Jacques Thienpont bought a plot of barely two hectares next to Petrus in 1979 for what was then considered an absurd sum, named it after the single pine tree on it, and started making tiny quantities of extremely concentrated Merlot.
Fewer than seven thousand bottles a year. Within a decade it was outselling first growths at auction, and it spawned an entire movement of small, obsessive, unclassified producers who worked out that scale was optional.
10. Château Lafite Rothschild
Pauillac, First Growth · around $1,000 a bottle
First among the first growths in the 1855 classification, and the most collected name in the world for most of the last forty years. Thomas Jefferson bought it. So did the court of Louis XV, where it was pushed by the Maréchal de Richelieu as a health tonic, which may be the single most effective piece of wine marketing ever executed.
The Rothschilds bought the estate in 1868. Lafite is the elegant, cedar-scented, slow-opening one of the five, and it is also the bottle that a generation of new Asian collectors chose as their entry point into fine wine in the 2000s, which sent its price somewhere the wine itself never asked to go.
11. Château Latour
Pauillac, First Growth · around $850 a bottle
The most powerful and the longest-lived of the five, from a vineyard on gravel close to the Gironde whose tower has been a landmark since the sixteenth century. In poor years Latour makes good wine, which is the real test, and in great years it makes something that needs thirty years before it is worth opening.
In 2012 the estate did something no other first growth has dared. It withdrew entirely from the en primeur futures system and now releases bottles only when it judges them ready to drink. It costs them cash flow and it is unambiguously better for the person drinking the wine.
12. Château Margaux
Margaux, First Growth · around $800 a bottle
The most beautiful building in Bordeaux, a Palladian mansion at the end of an avenue of plane trees, making the most perfumed of the first growths. Where Latour is force and Lafite is cedar, Margaux is violets and silk, and in a great vintage it is the one that makes people go quiet.
The estate declined badly through the middle of the twentieth century and was rescued in 1977 by the Mentzelopoulos family, who spent heavily on drainage and cellars and restored it within a decade. It is the clearest proof in the region that a first growth is a piece of ground plus continuous, expensive attention, and that the ground alone will not carry you.
13. Château Mouton Rothschild
Pauillac, First Growth · roughly $700 to $900 a bottle
The only estate ever promoted within the 1855 classification. Baron Philippe de Rothschild campaigned for it for decades under the motto Premier ne puis, second ne daigne, Mouton suis, first I cannot be, second I do not deign to be, I am Mouton, and in 1973 he won. The motto was rewritten the same day: first I am, second I was, Mouton does not change.
He also invented chateau bottling at the property in 1924, and in 1945 began commissioning a different artist to design each vintage’s label. Picasso, Bacon, Warhol, Freud, Koons. It is the most opulent and the most exotic of the Pauillacs, and the only first growth that is also an art collection.
14. Château Haut-Brion
Pessac-Léognan, First Growth · roughly $700 to $900 a bottle
The oldest brand in wine. Samuel Pepys recorded drinking “Ho Bryan” at a London tavern in 1663 and noted its “good and most particular taste”, which makes it the first individual wine estate ever named in print by a consumer. It is the only first growth from outside the Médoc, and it now sits inside the suburbs of Bordeaux itself, surrounded by houses.
The gravel here is deeper and warmer than in Pauillac, and the wine is smokier and earthier, often described as tasting of hot bricks and tobacco. It is the most distinctive of the five and, to my palate, the most consistently satisfying to actually drink.
15. Château Cheval Blanc
Saint-Émilion · around $800 a bottle
The great outlier of the Right Bank, planted to an unusually high proportion of Cabernet Franc on a gravel and clay site that borders Pomerol. Nobody else in Bordeaux built a first-rank wine on that grape, and nobody has successfully copied it.
The 1947 is the reason the name carries the weight it does. Made in a freakishly hot vintage with primitive equipment and sugar levels that should have produced a disaster, it is instead routinely named the greatest Bordeaux of the twentieth century, and a bottle now trades for the price of a car. The estate’s Christian de Portzamparc cellar, opened in 2011, is the best piece of modern architecture in the region.
16. Château d’Yquem
Sauternes · roughly $400 to $600 for recent vintages, far more for the great ones
The only estate in the 1855 classification awarded its own category above the first growths, Premier Cru Supérieur, and the greatest sweet wine ever made. It exists because of a fungus. Autumn mists off the Ciron river encourage botrytis, which shrivels the grapes and concentrates everything in them, and the pickers go through the vineyard as many as a dozen times taking berries one at a time.
The old estimate is one glass of wine per vine. In vintages judged unworthy, and there have been nine or so in the last century, Yquem simply does not release a wine at all. It will last a hundred years, and it is the most undervalued great wine on this list, because the world stopped drinking dessert.
Champagne
17. Dom Pérignon P3 Plénitude
Épernay · around $5,200 a bottle, the most expensive Champagne in the world
Dom Pérignon holds a portion of every vintage back on its lees for decades and releases it in what the house calls plenitudes. P2 emerges at around sixteen years. P3 comes out at thirty or more, and by then the wine has stopped being refreshing and started being something closer to a great white Burgundy with bubbles in it.
The house is named for the seventeenth-century Benedictine cellarer at Hautvillers who did not, despite the legend, invent sparkling wine, but did more than anyone to master blending across villages. The P3 is the single most convincing argument that Champagne is a wine for the cellar and not for the ice bucket.
18. Krug Clos du Mesnil
Le Mesnil-sur-Oger · around $2,270 a bottle
A walled vineyard of 1.84 hectares in the middle of a village in the Côte des Blancs, enclosed since 1698. Krug acquired it in 1971, spent eight years restoring it, and released the first vintage in 1979.
Everything about it is a rebuke to how Champagne normally works. Champagne is the art of blending across dozens of parcels to erase vintage variation. Clos du Mesnil is one grape, one walled plot, one year, fermented in small oak casks and bottled as it is. It is austere and almost painfully precise when young and extraordinary at twenty-five years.
19. Salon, Le Mesnil Blanc de Blancs
Le Mesnil-sur-Oger · roughly $800 to $1,500 a bottle
The purest idea in Champagne. Eugène-Aimé Salon was a furrier who made a wine for himself and his friends from Chardonnay in Le Mesnil, and commercialised it only in the 1920s. The house makes exactly one wine, from one village, from one grape, in one vintage, with no reserve wines and no malolactic fermentation.
And it declares a vintage only when the year is worthy, which has happened around forty times in more than a century. In every other year, the fruit goes to its sister house Delamotte and Salon simply does not exist. It is released after roughly ten years on lees and is barely ready then.
The Rhône
20. Château Rayas, Châteauneuf-du-Pape
Southern Rhône · roughly $1,200 to $1,800 a bottle
The most eccentric great estate in France. Châteauneuf-du-Pape is a warm, sun-baked appellation of thirteen permitted grapes and big stones, and Rayas ignores nearly all of it. One hundred percent Grenache, planted on cool pockets of sand rather than the famous galets, picked from vines in small clearings surrounded by woodland, and raised in old wood with nothing new about it.
The late Jacques Reynaud was famous for hiding from visiting buyers and once for pretending to be the gardener. The result tastes nothing like its neighbours. It is pale, perfumed and closer to great Burgundy than to anything else in the south, which is exactly why people chase it.
21. E. Guigal, La Mouline, La Landonne and La Turque
Côte-Rôtie · roughly $500 to $800 a bottle each
Known universally as the La Las. Three single-vineyard Syrahs from terrifyingly steep terraced slopes above the Rhône at Ampuis, each a few hundred cases, each aged around forty-two months in new oak, which should destroy them and instead does not.
They matter historically because Robert Parker awarded them perfect hundred-point scores repeatedly through the 1980s and 1990s, and in doing so dragged the northern Rhône from obscurity into the first rank of the world’s wine regions in about fifteen years. La Mouline is the perfumed one, La Landonne the brooding one, La Turque the balance between them.
Italy
22. Giacomo Conterno, Barolo Riserva Monfortino
Serralunga d’Alba, Piedmont · around $1,300 a bottle and climbing
Italy’s greatest wine by both price and consensus. Giovanni Conterno began making Monfortino in 1920 as a wine deliberately built to outlast everything around it, using the longest macerations and the slowest ageing in Piedmont, and the house has never modernised in the way the region did in the 1990s.
It comes from the Cascina Francia vineyard in Serralunga, is made only in vintages judged worthy, and spends around seven years in large old Slavonian oak casks before release. Nebbiolo at this level is pale, tannic, scented of tar and roses, and needs two decades. There is no wine in the world more indifferent to fashion.
23. Masseto
Bolgheri, Tuscany · roughly $950 to $1,200 a bottle
Seven hectares of blue clay on a hillside near the Tuscan coast, planted to Merlot in a country that had no tradition of it, and the wine that proved Italy could produce a first-growth equivalent from scratch within a generation. The first vintage was 1986.
It grew out of the Super Tuscan revolt, when a handful of estates decided that the rules of the Chianti appellation were holding them back and chose to be declassified as humble table wine rather than compromise. Masseto now has its own cellar dug into the hill and trades above almost everything in Bordeaux.
Spain
24. Vega Sicilia, Único
Ribera del Duero · roughly $450 to $600 a bottle
Spain’s undisputed first growth, founded in 1864 on the high plateau of Castile when Bordeaux varieties were brought in and planted alongside Tempranillo. It has been the wine of Spanish state occasions for over a century.
What sets it apart is time. Único spends around ten years ageing at the estate, in a combination of large oak, barrique and bottle, before it is released, and only in vintages considered worthy. In the years between, the estate quietly blends declassified lots into a multi-vintage bottling called Reserva Especial. Almost nobody else in the world holds stock that long, because almost nobody else can afford to.
Germany
25. Egon Müller, Scharzhofberger Riesling Trockenbeerenauslese
Wiltingen, the Saar · around $18,000 a bottle, the most expensive white wine outside Burgundy
The final entry, and the one most people have never heard of. The Müller family has held the Scharzhof since 1797. The Scharzhofberg is a steep slate slope in the Saar, one of the coldest serious vineyard sites in Europe, where in most years the grapes barely ripen at all.
In rare years botrytis arrives, and pickers go through selecting individual shrivelled berries by hand. A Trockenbeerenauslese might amount to a few hundred half-bottles from the entire estate. The result is barely six or seven percent alcohol, has acidity like a struck bell, tastes of apricot and slate and honey, and will still be alive in a century. It is the greatest sweet wine in the world that is not called Yquem, and it costs more.
The next ten, and an argument about America
The obvious objection to the list above is that it contains no wine from the New World, and I want to meet that head on rather than pretend nobody noticed.
Side Note · The Two That Did Not Make It
Screaming Eagle and Harlan Estate
Oakville and Oakville, Napa Valley · around $3,840 and around $1,620 a bottle
These two deserve saying out loud rather than burying in a footnote, because on price alone both belong in the twenty-five and one of them outranks Petrus.
Screaming Eagle is the more extreme story. A small parcel in Oakville, a first vintage in 1992, and a hundred-point score from Robert Parker that turned a few hundred cases a year into the most sought-after bottle in America almost overnight. The mailing list is closed, the waiting list for the mailing list is closed, and a case at auction has gone for six figures. Its Sauvignon Blanc, made in even smaller quantity, averages $3,470, which is more than any white wine in Bordeaux.
Harlan Estate is the more serious one. Bill Harlan set out in 1984 to build, in his words, a California first growth, and he meant the whole thing: the hillside site above Oakville, the multi-decade time horizon, the family succession. Nearly forty years on it is the most convincing New World claim to that status anybody has made.
So why are they not in the list? Not quality, and obviously not price. Time. The 1976 Judgement of Paris settled whether California could match France in a glass, and the answer was yes. What it could not settle is the question only decades answer: how these wines taste at fifty and eighty years, and whether the estates hold their standard through three or four changes of owner and winemaker. Bordeaux and Burgundy have filed two centuries of evidence. Napa has been at it since the 1970s and the file is still open.
That is not a snub. It is the one thing money cannot buy, and both estates know it better than I do. Ask me again in 2060.
The others I would put immediately behind the twenty-five: Ridge Monte Bello, which has the longest vertical track record in California and beat the French in 1976 and again in the 2006 rematch. Sassicaia, the original Super Tuscan and the wine that made Bolgheri possible. Penfolds Grange, Australia’s national treasure and a masterpiece of multi-region blending. Jean-Louis Chave, Hermitage, sixteen generations on the same hill since 1481. Domaine Ravéneau, Les Clos, the summit of Chablis. Quinta do Noval Nacional, from ungrafted pre-phylloxera vines, declared perhaps a dozen times a century. Gaja, Sorì San Lorenzo, which dragged Barbaresco into modernity. Domaine d’Auvenay, Lalou Bize-Leroy’s personal estate, whose Chevalier-Montrachet trades near $27,500. Château Ausone, the smallest and steepest of Saint-Émilion’s greats. And Jacques Selosse, the grower who changed how the whole of Champagne thinks about farming.
What to do about any of this
Almost nobody reading this is going to buy a bottle of Leroy Musigny, and that is fine, because the list is not a shopping list. It is a map of what the summit looks like and how it got there.
If you want to drink at this level without the arithmetic, three routes work. Buy the second wines: Carruades de Lafite, Pavillon Rouge, Petit Mouton, all made at the same estates from the same vineyards by the same people. Buy the great years of unfashionable regions: Sauternes, German Riesling, vintage Port and mature Rioja are all underpriced because taste moved on and quality did not. Or buy young Bordeaux from a good vintage, put it away for twenty years and forget about it, which is the only reliable way anyone has ever assembled a serious cellar.
And when you finally open something significant, open it with people who will notice. A great bottle drunk alone is a slightly sad piece of arithmetic. Drunk at a table, it is the whole point.
Whatever Suits You · Style. Sound. Substance.