A bottle of 1945 French wine has been sold for a record-breaking £424,000 at auction.
The Romanee-Conti – widely considered the planet’s finest Burgundy – was bought for 17 times its estimated worth at Sotheby’s in New York on Saturday.
It smashed the world’s previous high-mark for a standard bottle: a 1869 Chateau Lafite Rothschild which sold for a comparatively inexpensive £177,000 in Hong Kong in 2010.
A few minutes after Saturday’s sale, another 1945 Romanee-Conti went for £377,000.
The wine’s vineyard may help explain its worth. It spans just four acres in the Cote de Nuits region, with no more than 6,000 bottles produced each year.
The 1945 bottle was one of only 600 produced, just before the vines were pulled up for replanting with no more wine made until 1952.
Saturday’s lots came from the personal collection of Robert Drouhin, who directed the prominent wine producer Maison Joseph Drouhin from 1957 to 2003.
Elsewhere at the auction, a bottle of 60-year-old 1926 whisky fetched £641,000, failing to break the current £910,000 record for Scotch.
