One bottle of 1945 DRC or an Aston Martin?

After the news that a single bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti’s 1945 Romanée-Conti sold for an astounding US$558,000 at auction recently, Liv-ex has asked what else you could buy for that much money.

Photo: courtesy Sotheby’s

The sale of the bottle in New York the weekend before last, smashed the previous record for most expensive wine ever sold, which was a bottle of 1869 Lafite which went for US$233,000 in 2010.

Piers Morgan swiftly took to Twitter to announce the result “ridiculous” and even claimed one could buy “20” cases of 1961 Latour for the same amount.

Not quite, noted Liv-ex which crunched some numbers to see what half a million dollars could buy you.

As it happens, you could buy 105 bottles of 1961 Latour for that sum (the equivalent of nine 12-bottle cases). Not quite 20 cases but no puny amount of what is often considered one of the greatest fine wines of recent times.

Alternatively, you could buy 10 bottles of either the 2005 or 1990 vintages of La Romanée-Conti (if you absolutely had to have DRC) or 133 bottles (11 cases) of 2010 Petrus.

Looking beyond wine, half a million would also buy you: 400 ounces of gold, half a shred of the Banksy that “self-destructed” at auction recently, a one bedroom flat near Battersea Park, an Aston Martin DB11 or a private island in Panama.

Which, perhaps, just goes to show what good value most fine wine is really.