Got an e-mail from winebid on current hot lots today. One wine has a reserve of $4,155 for a bottle of 2010 Screaming Eagle sauvignon blanc. It has bids! Beyond insane.
Just saw out on winebid.com that the current bottle of 2010 screaming eagle sauvignon blanc is now starting at only $3565…already a $500 savings over what it was just months ago
Well, it’s not about the contents of the bottle but the label. I am not sure it is that much more sexy than one bottle of La Mission Blanc three bottles of Haut Brion.
Of course, but it’s all relative. Everyone has their own interpretation of value, which is ultimately a personal one, but as you know, it says little about the quality of the wine inside the bottle. Leroy is frightfully expensive, and I’d never buy it myself, but the wines are really good! (Though I know you don’t entirely share that view.)
To me, whether a wine is good and whether it’s worth buying are fundamentally different questions, and I find posts implying people who buy very expensive wines must have bad palates (especially when the poster clearly hasn’t tried the wine!) to be in poor taste. It’s performative frugality and adds nothing to the conversation. People spend money on lots of things I personally find silly, but it’s their money and they’re as entitled to spend it on Screaming Eagle Sauvignon Blanc as I am on Allemand.
I think the arithmetic is $25 for the wine and $3000 plus for the label.
And I have not tasted the wine, but I understand from someone whose palate is reasonably aligned to mine, that it is a very nice SB.
I think some people just want expensive wine to be bad so they can pat themselves on the back for drinking the right wines at the right prices. And it’s absolutely true that price and quality aren’t necessarily correlated in wine, but they’re also not un-correlated either.