This weekend a bottle of wine was sold for the modest sum of €12,000. But where? I hear you ask. On a private beach in St Tropez? No. In a luxury hotel in Hong Kong? Wrong again. The sale took place last Friday in Germany, in Trier to be exact, during the annual VDP Prädikat auction. And, just like every year, the estate owned by Egon Müller (a member of the Primum Familiae Vini (PFV) association incl. Marchesi Antinori, Château Mouton Rothschild, Joseph Drouhin, Famille Hugel, Champagne Pol Roger, Famille Perrin, Symington Family Estate, Tenuta San Guido, Torres and Vega Sicilia) smashed previous records.
With wines more expensive than Romanée Conti, Petrus, Chave, Krug and Dom Perignon, Egon Müller is a regular on the podiums. He sets new records almost every year in Trier with its very particular style of auction in which everything goes through brokers with whom wine aficionados place their orders. Egon Müller’s wines count among the most sought after bottles in the world and, according to the specialist website Wine Searcher, in a list of the 50 most expensive wines in the world, Egon Müller comes fourth with his Scharzhofberger Riesling Trockenbeerenauslese. Until Friday, September 18, 2015…
Twelve thousand euros for a bottle of wine (that’s exactly 75cl) is hardly peanuts. You can understand it when you are talking about rare bottles from very old vintages. But this is not an old vintage; this is a Trockenbeerenauslese 2003. No problem – it is very good I can assure you, although you need to wait a while. Incidentally, the event was celebrated with a few MV and Argonne 2004 magnums of Champagne Henri Giraud (the sole distributor of Egon Müller wines in France). But where are these bottles off to? Outside Germany that’s for sure. The traders who handle the orders have clients the world over and Russian buyers were at their side as were the Chinese. Let’s hope they got to share a few bottles. Oh yes because I forgot to mention that the bottles were not sold singly. Lots of no less than 18 bottles of Trockenbeerenauslese 2003 were sold for €12,000 a piece as well as 36 half bottles at €5,500 each… Including taxes and fees, so this makes it now the most expensive bottle in the world at 14,565 Euros. I’m looking forward to my next assignment in Russia or China. Perhaps I will stumble across one of these bottles in the cellar of a lover of great German Riesling wines…. A votre santé! Prost! за ваше здоровье! 碰被!
(*Since 2003, Guillaume Jourdan has been advising more than 200 prestigious wine estates for their international marketing & communication strategy incl. Chapoutier, Hugel, Dr Loosen, Famille Perrin, Cos d’Estournel, Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie’s Miraval…Write to info@vitabella.fr)
