When it comes to high-end wine, price certainty seems a given: we all know that Cristal sells for more than Dom Perignon, and that Dom Perignon sells for more than Moet. Not many people serve them all alongside each other. For the exercise to be vaguely meaningful, you would expect such a tasting to separate the “cuvées prestiges” from the proprietary marques. But then you would let the wines battle it out on the merits.
This is the easy example: what about Burgundy, where some parcels and some producers attract so much demand for so little wine that the idea of lining the wines up against each other is pretty much a fantasy. How many people have ever tasted the top five priced red burgundies from the same vintage against each other – blind? And if they hadn’t been told what was in the line-up and had been asked to cost to what was in the glass, how close would they get to the on-shelf price?
Years ago I was in the cellars of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (DRC) when the winemaker presented his boss (the owner of the domaine) with a sample of each of their two monopoles from the cask viz. the Romanée-Conti and the La Tâche. Aubert de Villaine had a 50/50 chance of getting it right (and he tastes both wines more frequently than probably anyone else on earth). And he fluffed it. When the wines are young, they taste identical, and even when they are older there’s not much to separate them except the price differential, which is in the order of a factor of five. La Tache sells for around R60k; Romanée-Conti for R 300k. Per bottle!
All this is relevant because all that separates Romanée-Conti (the vineyard) from Romanée St Vivant (the appellation) is a dirt track. Romanée St Vivant is a bigger, and has several owners, including the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. So the wines sell for about one tenth the price of Romanée-Conti itself. So it’s not hard to see that it’s not quality alone but also rarity that drives the price.
But what about the parcels within Romanée St Vivant – where the owners include Domaine Leroy (now even more expensive than DRC), Domaine Dujac and Domaine Arnoux Lachaux? The section of Romanée St Vivant which abuts Romanée-Conti itself (the so-called Quatre Journaux) has tiny parcels of exceptional wine. All sell for a fraction of the price of Burgundy’s icon red, yet they come from land which is literally metres apart from the Domaine’s vineyard.
It’s really quite simply: you can chase rarity within the appellation and pay about R300k per bottle (assuming you can find an authentic bottle), or, for 5% of that amount, you can but a bottle of Romanée St Vivant Les Quartre Journaux. It comes from a tiny parcel which the Latour family has owned for over 125 years and even an amateur golfer could hit a ball from its furthest boundary from Romanée-Conti, over both vineyards, and into the Côte.