Are Burgundy Wines Worth The Eye-watering Valuation?

Burgundy wines are highly priced for their rarity and prestige but are they worth the eye-watering valuation?

- Simon Lim

“I desire only the long ecstasy of wine, and desire not to awaken.” – Li Bai

If, however, you are more of a Soros than a drunken poet, and look at wine as an investment, then ignore the red-nosed platitudes and focus on the black tipped profits. The key to gain is to buy quality, and in oenology, many argue, that would be the King of Grapes, the Pinot Noir.

If the Pinot Noir is the king of grapes, then the Burgundy terroir is its Camelot. The top bottles in the world come from hallowed and tiny grounds of Burgundy: think Domaine Romanée Conti’s trifecta of the Échezeaux, La Tache and Richebourg vineyards. Wines here sell for astronomical sums, and only go up; the rarest is the 1945 Romanée-Conti, of which only 608 bottles were made.

To boot, the late winemaker Henri Jayer's cellar of the vintages from 1978 to 2001 of Vosne-Romanee Cros-Parantoux, was sold for an eye-watering €30 million last year. For the buyers, it would be more likely mouth-watering; these wines are the last of the Mohicans, and a testament to its Indian chief who spent his whole life coaxing the best of out his scraggly and rocky three acres of land.