The greatest wine purchase ever

WINE TALK
21

If I’m interpreting JLL’s book correctly, these are all fathers and sons, but not the same vines. It appears that Emile had a couple of small parcels, mostly in Le Mollard, while his son Joël (and now Joël’s two sons) have a larger parcel in La Viallière. The 2010 and 2013 would be the latter parcel (as are the '15s I’m sitting on), the '78s in the auction lot would be the former.

As for the OP, I would have been £19x,xxx short of the funds needed to make the buy back in 1994, but if only I’d known. Just the '78 Rhônes… flirtysmile

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23

The funny thing about all those “looking back” lists is that the wine hasn’t changed, only the price did.

We could all have maxed out on Rousseau Chambertin at 400$/bottle 10 years ago but didn’t. If we’d be offered those wines at that price today we’d jump on them. It’s like the Warren Buffet thing “Price is what you pay, value is what you get”: value doesn’t change, prices do… and as a community we’re much better at knowing prices than fundamental value.

There’s a bunch of wines today that we know and are widely available at a reasonable price, but we’re not maxing out on them because the price looks “fair”. In 10 years they’ll be super popular, trading at much higher prices and we’ll all reminisce about how amazing a deal they were back in the days/regret we didn’t buy more. The vinous wheel of life.

24

Great post.

There are certainly wines I drink now but don’t cellar a lot of, because I believe I’ll be able to buy them in the future at a good price. If I knew the prices were going to go up, I might cellar more of them. It’s just a fact of having limited cellar space… I would rather put in a bottle that I won’t be able to find or afford later rather than one that I will.

Also, money does change over time. Even just based on inflation, GBP200,000 would be GBP400,000 by now. And the S&P is 6x what it was in 1994, so that would be GBP 1,200,000, or about $1.6 million. Maybe this cellar is worth more, or maybe it just contains wines in quantities that would be unobtainable, but it’s not a cheap cellar either now or back in 1994.

25

I think the most impressive thing is just looking at the quantities of the wine that would be impossible to find today. Even if costs were similar, just finding all of this today would be a challenge.