The world’s most expensive wines!

The world is full of expensive wines, which are often treated as being more for investment than for consumption. Each year, Wine-Searcher publishes lists of the most expensive from certain regions and of particular alcohol types. As foretold in a previous blog post (The world’s most expensive Australian wines?), I thought that I might now look at the area lists for 2024. This is important, in the sense that the upper price bracket determines the top of the pile.

Each list of 10 wines covers “The Most Expensive Wines on Wine-Searcher” for each of the named regions. The criteria for inclusion over the years have generally been: “a wine must have been produced over five consecutive vintages and have a minimum of 20 different offers in our search engine.” The prices quoted in the lists are their Global Average Retail Price (see: Average wine prices).

There are 2024 lists available for these areas: Argentina, Australia, Bordeaux, Burgundy red and Burgundy white, Champagne, Italy, Napa, New Zealand, Spain, and Uruguay. There were 13 (not 10) wines available from Uruguay, due to equal prices.

These wines are listed in the figure at the bottom of this post, with one row per wine and one column showing the Wine-Searcher GARP price, along with its area (click to enlarge). The wines are sorted from most to least expensive, and their rank order is shown.

These data are summarized in the next figure, which shows the average rank order and the average bottle price for each region. There are clearly massive differences in price between the areas, with a 200-fold stretch from Uruguay up to Red Burgundy. The most expensive wine is: Leroy Musigny Grand Cru (red Burgundy) at $38,267 per bottle. [As an aside, the average US salary in 2024 is $60K.]

The presence of Burgundy at the top of the list is no great surprise, remembering that this only represents the 10 most expensive wines; and the reds being more expensive than the whites is also no great surprise. I doubt that Pinot noir and Chardonnay are intrinsically better grapes than, say, Cabernet sauvignon. However, apparently Vivino users did once rate Pinot noir as being better than Cabernet sauvignon, overall (Cabernet sauvignon versus Pinot noir: which is better?).

Nor is it any surprise that Champagne comes next in the list, with its expensive vintage cuvées, and especially as the grapes are again Pinot noir and Chardonnay. These two grape varieties comprised the top 20 wines based on price, before the first Cabernet (see below).

It may, however, surprise a few people that Napa ranks next, ahead of Bordeaux. Napa's 10 most expensive wines certainly do compete globally on price (the wineries have made sure of that). For example, the top Ghost Horse Vineyard Premonition Cabernet Sauvignon ($6,001 per bottle) handsomely out-does both the Petrus (Pomerol, $4,250) and the Le Pin (Pomerol, $3,719).

Italy is slightly ahead of Spain, on average, which out-does Australia. Note that Argentina ranks ahead of New Zealand based on average price, but not on average rank. This is due mainly to one wine: Catena Zapata Estiba Reservada Agrelo, which costs twice as much as the next most expensive Argentinian wine (and thus greatly affects the average price).

It remains to now compare the bottle prices to the assessed wine quality scores (out of 100), as listed by Wine-Searcher. The data are shown in the figure above, with one dot per wine. There are 10 wines that do not have any score provided on Wine-Searcher (and are thus not shown).

There generally is a pattern in the figure, in the sense that the most expensive wines do tend to have the best scores. However, not all of the high-scoring wines necessarily cost the most money. For example, the 97-point wines vary in price from $243 to $20,690, and the 96-point wines vary from $252 to $17,884. Clearly, value for money varies wildly. Interestingly, the only 100-point wine in the list costs an average of just $1,635 — Chateau Angelus Homage to Elisabeth Bouchet (Saint-Émilion). Go for it!

We have been told that these days, wine price is related to increasing score (Weighing wine scores against price), but the data here make it clear that where the wine comes from has a far greater effect on price than its assessed quality.

In terms of the future, there are obvious omissions from the data. For example, Germany, and even the Loire and Alsace, are missing from the regions, which means that Riesling is missing from the grapes. I think that I would have picked these ahead of, say, Uruguay.