How the Very Rich Taste Wine

March 27, 2017 – If your net worth is more than $30 million you qualify for a rarified group of approximately 211,000 people in the world who account for 19 percent of luxury market spending according to research firm Wealth-X.  In a recent article by Matthew Dalton in The Wall Street Journal, these people are not the one percent we’ve heard so much about.  They are the 0.1 percent.

Luxury goods behemoth LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton knows exactly how to tap into the desire of this elite group to be pampered and treated as special.  They have turned a Paris apartment into an elegant, invitation-only tasting venue where the right amount of money buys access to old and rare bottles of Dom Perignon Champagne or four gallon bottles of Cheval Blanc.  That size bottle is known as a Nebuchadnezzar.

A base price for sampling wines and Cognac with dinner prepared by a celebrity chef for 12 people is around $16,000 but that’s just the starting point.  All that conviviality is sure to lead to ordering more rare and pricey wines but as the saying goes, if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it.

Moët Hennessy’s wine brands include Krug, Dom Perignon, and Veuve Cliquot Champagnes, Chateau d’Yquem, Cheval Blanc and Ao Yun. The latter is a luxury cabernet sauvignon wine made from vineyards in the mountains of China’s Yunnan province, near to Tibet.   It’s first vintage, 2013 was released to great acclaim last year and is available to purchase at $300 a bottle.