Fermented grapes.
The taste of a $233,000 bottle of red wine must have something to do with Descartes.
The world’s most expensive wine sold out of a winery was the Penfolds “2004 Block 42 Kalimna”. It cost A$168,000 per bottle. The company produced only 12 of these wines, and one of their very first customers was a Chinese restaurateur in Hong Kong — Mr Wong Wing Chee.
The world’s most expensive bottle of wine ever sold at an auction was Châteaux Lafite-Rothschild bought by another Hong Kong Chinese for A$232,692. Chateaux Lafite Rothschild has sold a few thousand bottles to China to-date.
There are no records of wine collections sold privately. I am sure somewhere a Chinese might have paid more than the prices that are fetched by auctioneers or wineries.
What does a $233,000 bottle of red tastes like?
Penfold’s chief winemaker: “There is something magical about this wine, it has an ethereal dimension and a saturated blackness on the palate, and it’s extraordinarily perfumed with layer upon layer of flavour.”
Saturated blackness on the palate?
I struggle with understanding what “saturated blackness” tastes like especially when it comes in various layers. Imagine trying to translate this into the Chinese language. Perhaps the winemaker is just trying to tell us what he thinks it tastes like.
Numerous research has proven that there is little if not no correlation between taste and price. http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/handle/37328.
The experience (taste) of wine is merely an interpretation of our senses by our brain. This interpretation is at best highly subjective. To put it simply, if we think or are told that the wine is good — it must taste good. The problem here lies neither with the wine, nor the marketing machinery but with our expectation that our tongue and sense of smell can be used to define objective pleasure. We expect that our taste can be quantified on a 100 point scale.
We’ve somehow managed to turn the most romantic of drinks into a commodity worthy of Consumer Reports and price levels.
Our tongues have been fooled
In other words, we have been fooled or our brains have tricked our tongues. “I think therefore I am” — Rene’ Descartes. Perhaps Descartes himself may have even helped the French wine industry by convincing the world to think that French wines are the best wines.
So for the rest of us regular folks, who may not have a spare few hundred thousand dollars to spend on Penfolds Block 42 or Châteaux Lafite-Rothschild, I am sure we can imagine the taste to be layer upon layer of flavoursome black fermented grapes.
