What it's worth?
Very little, if anything, has intrinsic value: a bottle of wine may cost R50 to produce, but if no-one wants to buy it, it’s worth nothing. If, a day later, two bidders arrive at an auction and compete against each other to acquire it, so that it’s knocked down for R5 000, nothing about the beverage has changed, only its perceived desirability.
True commodities – wheat, coffee, gold, oil – (where supposedly objective quality criteria exist) trade at prices which refl ect a less idiosyncratic relationship between product and purchaser. However much a dealer may enjoy caffeine, when he buys hundreds of tons of Brazilian coffee futures, he’s not thinking about his own gratification. He has no intention of keeping the stock. He plans to sell it when the price is right, when it’s time to move on. I knew the wife of a carpet dealer who said she had learned never to fall in love with any of the pieces in her home: sometimes she would walk through the door and find that the hallway runner had been removed because her husband had a customer for it.
Bulk Chardonnay (or Cabernet, or Pinotage) is something of a commodity. Providing it complies with a number of chemical specs – and tastes passable – it can be traded at prices which are generally known in that segment of the industry. So in a curious way are the most expensive examples of these varieties: most of the people who buy DRC Montrachet, Château Lafite or Kanonkop Black Label know the price, and are not planning on consuming it. They are hoping to find someone who will reward their prescience in buying it by paying even more at some stage in the future.
What makes these wines so much more desirable than their poor bulk cousins is only partly aesthetic. True, a great bottle of Montrachet, served at its peak, is likely to stop even the most hardened spritzer drinker in his tracks. But what is really at issue is how human beings express their own satisfaction at their material success. The rarer, the more expensive, the harder-for-othersto- find a product is, the more those who have the means will pay to obtain it. This does not mean that there is not a material difference in the quality of a bottle of Montrachet (or a Hermes handbag, or a pair of Ferragamo shoes) and the more pedestrian generic. But there is no proportion at all in the pricing differential.
The 1989 First Growths, now 20 years old and ready to drink, are selling for roughly 30% less than the hugely hyped 2009s – even though they offer a known and easily verifi able pleasure compared with the as yet unbottled ‘fingerlings’ the super-wealthy of today must have ‘at any price’. If the benchmark is drinking pleasure, there’s more joy to be had for the next decade or two drinking the 1989s. However, if it’s the gratification of ownership (which I am told is the primary reason for having La Perla underwear), clearly the 2009s have even superseded the transient happiness which came with buying the 2005s.
The late Len Evans, the (not very tall) giant who bestrode the Australian wine industry for most of the past 40 years, once told the story of the big-spender who asked for “the most expensive bottle in this restaurant”. When the sommelier returned having decanted their oldest and finest bottle of Grange, the punter was quite badly put out by the anonymity of the decanter. “How do I know,” he demanded, “that the wine in that jug is the same as the bottle you showed me?” According to legend, the sommelier simply replied, “If you can’t tell, it makes no difference anyway.”
