So, I was Christmas shopping at a major liquor retailer in Austin when I happened to see a bottle of something (cognac maybe?) that was priced at $811 per bottle. I don’t know if the bottle was 750ml or a full liter. Still, $811?!
Has anyone ever had a sip of something so expensive? What makes it so expensive? Is it worth the cost? For $811, I would expect that to be a truly life-changing drink.
So what is a crazy expensive drink like?
Many years ago I was invited to partake in a recreation of the meal from the movie “Babette’s Feast.” This included our hosts purchasing the closest wines that could be obtained to those that were served in the movie. One of them was over $200 for the bottle.
It was delicious, but I doubt that it was 10 times as delicious as a good $20 bottle of wine.
If you were shopping at Spec’s, it might have been FERRAND COGNAC RSV ANCESTRALE 70 YR [FRANCE] at $810.52 for, yes, a 750ML bottle. That is hardly the top of the line, though. There is also REMY MARTIN LOUIS XIII BLACK PEARL [FRANCE], which, if Spec’s Online can be trusted, is $17893.90.
I have had whiskeys that were close to the $800/bottle level. My opinion, and this is on almost all goods, is that there is a very definite improvement in quality when you go from the rock-bottom price to the mid-price, but as you get up above mid-price points the marginal improvement in quality drops as the price increases. There are certainly exceptions, but in general a $50 bottle of whiskey is a lot better than a $12 bottle of whiskey. A $100 bottle of whiskey is better, but I can’t really tell the difference much beyond that point.
I think that if you are spending $17,000 on a bottle of cognac, you are mostly doing it to prove to people that you can spend $17,000 on a bottle of cognac.
I’ve had some wines that would easily sell in that range, if not more. IMO, unless you are a student of the drink, you probably won’t appreciate it. I know a bit about wine, have tasted quite a lot of it, and I couldn’t say that super expensive wine was obviously better than other $100 or even sone $50/bottle wines I’ve had.
In that market, prices is largely subjective, but also reflective of limited availability. You’re not going to get a mass produced wine that is going to sell for $1,000-- there’s just too much of it.
I’ve had $800/bottle cognac. It isn’t that much better than $400/bottle cognac. Like Reno Nevada said, the high the price, the smaller the increase in quality. But let me tell you, both of those brandies were parsecs beyond the Christian Brothers I put in my coffee.
A really overpriced bottle of Sam Adams Utopia?
Off the top of my head, I think the stuff goes for one to two hundred dollars but if it’s scarce in your area that could change the pricing. Also, cognac etc is usually mentioned in the description.
To be honest, $800 per liter/bottle is only in the middle of the range when it comes to fancy beverage prices. Rare wines routinely get into the thousands per bottle. There are people who buy them as investments.
I have never tried anything in the $800 range, but I have had a chance to a scotch and a port that were in the $200-300 range.
They were both very good, but I know for a fact that if you made me do a blind tasting with $50 bottles on side and $300 bottles on the other side, I couldn’t consistently tell you which was which. (In fact, if we’re talking about wine, I’d probably side with the $10 bottle as often as the others. In the scotch world, I’ll pay a little premium - say $50 instead of $30, but not more.)
Bevmo sent me an email yesterday flogging a $29,999 bottle of 50 year old Glenfiddich. There’s only one 750 ml bottle available at this price, so hurry! At least delivery is free.
In addition to conspicuous consumption, the thing to realize about the prices of luxury goods is that there’s a very long tail to wealth distribution.
Think of an average luxury purchase a person from a developed country might make. Say, $20 for a bottle of wine. For a substantial fraction of humanity, $20 is what they survive on in a month. It would be unconscionable to waste that on a single bottle. But for the rest of us, it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like a nice-ish bottle of wine.
There are plenty of people out there who are 40+ times richer than the average citizen of a developed country. Why should they give any more thought to their $800 bottle than we do to our $20 one?
In answer to the OP, here’s a Chateau Latour for $4,000. I really like Wine.com, but some of their high end bottles are way out of my league.
I dont know much about Cognac. I know more about Whisky. Many of the high end purchases are investments. They are not bought to consume.
Are they worth it? Some probably are worth it, some not; meaning some will taste very, very good. Though as a consumer you may feel its not $811 worth of goodness you are tasting. A lot of the price however is just due to rarity(age, single cask, limited edition etc)and excise duty. Add to that a Sales Tax and you have yourself a very expensive product. A product either for the luxury consumer, or the canny investor.
Free delivery only within California, otherwise I may have been interested.
Yep, I was Spec’s in Sunset Valley (where Academy used to be). Perhaps they had a run on the $17K stuff! 
One of the most enjoyable parts of reading Moderist Cusine was their everceration of wine culture. There are plenty of experiments where wine experts were shown to rate “mediocre” wines vastly higer when served with the label of a much more expensive bottle, but Modernist Cusine took it much further by “hyper-decanting” wines in a blender and removing sediment with laboratory filters, getting high ratings for 2 Buck Chuck via double-blind testing.
It may be that the retailer has it on the shelf not expecting to sell it. It’s just a decoration that makes the store seem classy.
Just wanted to say that is a very expensive, but amazing book! If you are at all interested in cooking/food and can read it by any means you’ll probably love it.
If you’re ever inclined to make the world’s most expensive salad dressing, you can use Buckyballs dissolved in olive oil, priced at $490.00 a liter.
I got to try some Mount Gay Tricentennial rum a few years ago. I’m not a rum person normally, but the guy hosting the party I was at was definitely into his rum. He provided some $50 for comparison.
I felt the expensive stuff was smoother, had more nuanced tasted, and was all around a nicer drink.
Then I switched to the ‘cheap’ stuff, because you really shouldn’t waste rum that costs over $500 a bottle on me. Let someone who really appreciates it enjoy it.
