POLL: What is the most valuable bottle of wine in your cellar?

What is the most expensive bottle of wine in your cellar?

  • Under $50
  • $50 - $99
  • $100 - $149
  • $150 - $249
  • $250 - $399
  • $400 - $599
  • $600 - $799
  • $800 - $1099
  • $1100 - $1499
  • $1500 - $1999
  • $2000 - $2999
  • $3000 - $4999
  • $5000 - $9999
  • $10,000 - $19,999
  • $20,000 - $34,999
  • $35,000+

0 voters

The thread about no wine being safe from getting its cork pulled at any given moment offered some fascinating dialogue, and prompted me to create this poll. What is the most valuable bottle of wine in your cellar? I’d suggest current auction prices as reported by WMJ (CellarTracker provides quarterly snapshot) or WS-low. The list price at The French Laundry is probably not a good reference!

I have a firm $200 cap. Some of those, I suppose, have slightly appreciated–but I have no plans on selling.

I didn’t realize that 1991 Gentaz-Dervieux had crossed the $3,000 mark. It turns out that I have a number of bottles with current values of $1,500 or more, but I’m pretty sure that I didn’t pay more than $150 for any of them. My problem is that almost all of my most highly appreciated wines are wines that I don’t only love, but that have a special significance to me for other reasons so I won’t likely take advantage of their values.

Yeah, the Weinberg post about opening a $10,000.00 - $20,000.00 bottle of wine tugged at my sensibilities as well. While there may be something possibly valued higher there isn’t anything in my cellar that I’ve spent more than $200 on. There is diversity in this forum and we just need to come to grips with the fact that some people have a much higher or lower purchasing threshold than ourselves.

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It’s important to keep in mind that current value is a very different thing from purchase price. It’s mistaken to assume that just because someone has a bottle worth $10K in the cellar that they paid anything close to that. Those who have been buying for a long time were lucky to purchase at much more affordable prices. I’ve only been at this 20 years and I have quite a few that fall into that category. Those at it for even longer have a lot more.

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I have a bottle of '61 Latour that cost me $275, and a bottle of '82 Margaux that cost me $250. Other than that I have an upper limit of $150 on purchases.
I want to share the Latour with a few close family members. Unfortunately we haven’t been able to get together since the pandemic started. If it doesn’t look like we can do it this spring may get tired of waiting and just open the Latour some weeknight.
The Margaux is actually more special to me so I’ve saved that for an occasion - such as Valentine’s Day.
Probably the top 5% of my bottles are unique enough to me that I will only open on a holiday, birthday or similar. The rest are fair game.

So, I have one bottle that has appreciated a crazy amount and skews the value of the cellar. I generally won’t spend more than $100 on a bottle, but sometimes things appreciate at a crazy level.

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$1000 seems to be the mental threshold for me…once a wine appreciates in value to that point, I sell or trade them, à la Screagle or Lafite. Looking at CT, I see that I’ve never opened a wine from my own cellar that was worth over $1k, although I’m determined to drink that ‘82 Mouton at some point!

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Most valuable bottle has gone up 22X over what I paid for it. That’s not a brag. I am just old.

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Our comfort zone tops out at around $200 but I have a couple bottles that CT and Wine-Searcher say have significantly increased in value over my purchase price. The set of 2013 Bedrock Wine Co. Syrah Expositions are one case in point.

I have a few first growths and older Las Cases / Palmer, all between the $400-600 range. Otherwise nothing over about $200 (some Bordeaux, 1 Barolo, 1 Burgundy, and 2-3 higher end Napa), and even that is a pretty slim list. Average bottle is probably $50-75

Agree, very large spread between the wine I paid the most for and current value.

My answer would have been a couple tiers higher had I not sold some 1996 Screaming Eagle in the early 2000’s! I took a 3-pack of the '96 as collateral from a “wine friend” shortly after release in a deal I was certain would go south. I remember like it was yesterday how impressed I was with myself when I sold them for $1000/ea. Looking at the current WS price- not as impressed with myself.

My most valuable bottles were all gifts and purchases I would never have been able to justify…some good vintage first growth Bordeaux.
$250 is my limit…Can’t resist Sassicaia and some other similarly priced wines. There are many wines in the $600-800 range I would love to drink…but I always ask myself something along these lines…would I rather have one bottle of Cheval Blanc or three bottles of Sassicaia?

I have a single 3L of a child’s birth year wine that has appreciated substantially in the 20+ years since I bought it, in addition to starting off 4 times the value of most bottles of the same wine. If I’d have bought a 750 of that wine, my poll answer would be less than half of what it was (a different 750 from an older child’s birth year, also a singleton). Any non-child’s-birth-year wines that appreciated to even half the value of those two have already been sold (which hasn’t been many). All of those were purchased for non-trophy prices and turned into auction darlings at some point over the years.

If I answered for the 98% of my cellar that isn’t “splurge” bottles from the year we were married and the years our kids were born, my answer would be at least six notches lower on the poll, maybe seven. But of course that’s not the question.

I do get surprised sometimes when I pull the CT info for the year-end “what did you drink” thread and see some of the values. 1998 Ornellaia looks like the most valuable I’ve drunk recently (2019) at over $450. I’m sure I paid between $50 and $75 for it. Curiously, CT says the most valuable wine I’ve drunk recently is the 1998 Etude cab I drank last August, which it shows at $3,060.94 - but I’m really hoping that’s an error…
[wow.gif]

My answer is that I don’t actually know, and probably won’t ever, unless for some reason I have to quit drinking, and dispose of my cellar.

Per CT, the 89 Haut Brion, and La Mission HB are worth more than the 82 Mouton I have. Go figure. I bought those ages ago on release. I already drank the 82 Latour, Cheval, and Margaux. Yum! Besides those three all others fall way below that.

WHY No higher category ?? [wow.gif] [snort.gif] neener

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I have a 1998 Chateau Petrus that a client gave me. And yes it will be consumed by me, when ready, and probably with that client. He also happens to be a best friend.

This thread, or something like it, comes up at least yearly and sometimes more frequently.

In broad strokes, should we count as the value of a wine the price we paid or what it’s worth today, say what we could get if we auctioned or sold it.
People come down on either side, some say the value is what they paid, some say the value is what they could get today.

Eventually we all agree that the value is what you could get today minus the frictions involved (time, effort) in getting that value. And then you should compare today’s auction value minus the price you would be willing to pay today for more of that wine, divided by the frictional cost involved in selling that bottle.

Let’s say it takes 5 hours of your time to sell a bottle of wine that originally cost you $200 but now trades for $1,000 and you would never buy and open another bottle of this if it cost more than $500 (your indifference point). So if you time is worth more than $1,000 - $500 / 5 = $100 per hour then you will drink this bottle and you will not sell it.

It clearly makes little sense to sell a single bottle unless it’s very easy to do so (which is why Commerce Corner is a good solution for those who want to sell a few bottles)

It may make much more sense if you have say 1,000 bottles that have reasonably appreciated as the time cost is split among many bottles.

In answer to the value question.
I have a few vintages of Leroy “Musigny” where I paid around $300 or $400 per bottle (including a single of the 2005),
also a few vintages of Chave ‘Cathelin’ (paid about $400),
a few vintages of DRC ‘RC’ (paid around $1,200),
some mags of 1999 and 2002 Roumier 'Amoureuses" (paid $700 per mag),
a 3L of 1999 Conterno ‘Monfortino’ that I paid $800 for and will outlive me!
and a single Imperial of 1990 Margaux (paid $550) that probably fit the “can I bring myself to open that cork” question.
Good thing we have time to decide!

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I purchased a bottle of 2000 Mouton from Costco upon release for $305. That’s my most expensive purchase, and it’s now the most expensive bottle that I have. It does make it difficult to figure out when to open it.

-J