I stumbled across a bottle of 1990 Gentaz-Dervieux in my local caviste’s shop. It was from the owner’s private collection. He looked at the fill (which was maybe 1.5cm low) and asked me CHF60 (roughly $60) for the bottle. No hesitation in accepting the offer. Previously I believed I would never have the chance to experience one of these wines because of cost and scarcity (wine searcher shows one available in the US at $2,000).
It was a perfect bottle. My wife’s first reaction after tasting the wine was “fumée”. It was all bramble fruit, violets, smoky wood and pungent peppery black truffle. The fruit was floral, incredibly fresh and sharp yet there was a charred note, the smoke and truffle. It was very bright on the palate. Amazingly full without ever approaching heavy. Incredibly aérien.
I know this wine has been discussed recently in a thread specifically if the cost justifies the wine. I was very happy to have the opportunity to remove the cost issue and focus on the wine. It is very well made and terribly interesting. Delicious. It matched perfectly with pigeon breasts and truffles with sautéed spinach on the side. It probably goes without saying, I would happily pay CHF60 again.
Drank a boatload of the '85, '88, '90 back in the mid-late '90s. Wasn’t rare then, was frequently offered in auctions for around $40 or $50 per bottle. Amazing when these things become rare…
Got me thinking, what would I do if I found a rare or obscure bottle for $60 that may be worth near $2,000, and assuming I felt comfortable that the seller knew what he/she was selling, would I drink it or sell it? Now mind you, I have only sold one wine in my entire life and have no intent to flip anything in my cellar - well, will give away my 2007 Chateauneuf de Papes - but I think in this Gentaz hypothetical, I might feel inclined to flip it. Sounds terrible, I know, but that buys an awful lot of very good wine.
Robert,
I have always taken the other view. I will NEVER pay 2k for a bottle of Gentaz, but I would love to drink one. Finding one at a below market price would let me have that experience.
I understand your logic, but for some people there is a difference between actually going out of pocket $2k for a certain experience, and foregoing the $1940 (in this example) you could add to your pockets by flipping it. Call it the Goldilocks situation: you have just enough money that you don’t need the extra $1940 (or, more accurately, don’t need it more than you want to experience the wine), but not enough that you are comfortable spending $2k out of pocket to experience a wine with that price tag.
Classic Behavioral Economics issue. People view money differently based on whether or not it’s already been spent, this is why people make bad decisions with money. Take these 2 examples.
I give you a bottle of 1990 Gentaz-Dervieux. Then I offer you the opportunity to sell it for $2,000.
I give you $2,000. Then I offer you the opportunity to buy a bottle of 1990 Gentaz-Dervieux for that same $2,000.
In both cases all options are identical, you can either have $2,000 or a bottle of 1990 Gentaz-Dervieux. But people view these differently based on the Sunk Cost fallacy.
Sure, if you are just trying to coldly maximize the amount of money you have, then there is no difference between those options, and it is a good theoretical exercise. But if actually confronted with the choice the OP faced, you are not making the decision in a vacuum. There is risk in buying a $2000 bottle - provenance issues, for example. If you pay $60 for it and it turns out to be a dud, you’re not hurting as much as if you paid $2000. There are also questions about whether you think the wine equivalent of a dying species should be opened/enjoyed rather than traded as a commodity. And there are the usual human questions concerning how people think about money. As you point out, humans are imperfect economic creatures.
Since you are being generous I would rather have the wine because I have two thousand dollars but finding the Gentaz has become increasingly more difficult/impossible. Finding two thousand dollars is not that hard.
Usually, if you take a wine lover, if you give them the $2k and then offer them the opportunity to trade the $2k for the bottle of wine, they’ll keep the $2k. But if you give them the bottle of wine and offer them the opportunity to trade for $2k a lower percentage vs the first example will do that trade. Inefficient people, a great thing. Allows efficient people to capitalize in many phases of business.
Disagree. And if you want to pick it apart like that, I wrote that I would not pay that for the bottle. The experience of sharing one with friends is worth more than 2k to me as I would not be a seller.
Perhaps I am an inefficient person, as PH notes below. There are frictions in the market that make the effort to turn around and sell the bottle “cost” more to me. I could be doing something else than finding a buyer, figuring out how to get paid, figuring out how to ship without incurring the wrath of UPS, responding to another WB “absolutist” post. My time is more valuable to me than that. So 2k - opporuntity cost of screwing around trying to sell the bottle < 60 and lost revenue from not selling bottle but retained time + experience.
So, perhaps I would not pay 2k for a Gentaz is the proper phrase. If you weigh the opportunity costs, etc, I will keep the bottle at 60 and not at 2000. Personally, there is probably some cost of entry that I am willing to pay for any wine experience and these values are not in relation to the market value of the wine, but rather the cost relative to the fun/excitement my friends and I will have drinking the bottle, regardless of market value.
Fantastic story Paul. Call it rational or not, but the meteoric rise of Gentaz shows that there is still resonating desire for traditional Northern Rhones.
Thankfully, superlative winemakers like Mssrs Allemand, Gonon, Benetiere, Texier, Levet and others give us the chance to drink that lineage.
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