The world's most expensive tipples

If you are looking to spend a million dollars in 10 minutes, Le Clos, the lovely wine store at Dubai airport, has the goodies for you. To be fair to them, they have plenty of stuff at less heady prices—I got away with $28 (around ₹ 1,875) for a bottle of Japanese whisky—but with 10 minutes more to kill for my flight, I decide to check out the astronomical end of luxury liquor. It was pretty intoxicating—I was high on the prices alone, which is just as well because getting a sip or sniff of these exclusive elixirs is unlikely.

I ask Mark Moran, the duty manager, to fly me through the five most prized items in the store. He promptly walks me out of the door—I must confess I was a tad perplexed at this move—and leads me to the window display on the left side, where sits the star attraction, a single bottle of Cognac Croizet Cuvée Léonie 1858.

Hmm, I say, as I look at a dusty old bottle, unlabelled at that, and look back at Moran to ask its price. He says $185,000 with a straight face. He is used to these prices, I am not, so I gasp loudly, my mind racing with some mental math and coming up with the unlikely number of $1,000 a sip. What makes it so special? Turns out the high price itself is one of its praiseworthy features; it holds the Guinness World Record for being the most expensive cognac ever sold at auction. What’s more, it seems Winston Churchill and General Dwight D. Eisenhower cracked open a bottle of it in 1944 while plotting the Allies’ victory in World War II. I am not sure how they spirited the bottle out of enemy-occupied France (there may be a movie plot here), but it sure proves this century-and-a-half-old cognac is a winner.

Moran’s second pick is Château Margaux 2009 Balthazar. A balthazar, I learn, is a massive 12-litre bottle—it can hold 16 regular bottles of wine—and this Margaux big boy retails at a whopping $195,000, making it the most expensive bottle of wine on planet Earth. I take a deep breath.

Okay, it’s a prestigious first growth vineyard, I get that; 2009 is a great vintage for Bordeaux, I get that; Robert Parker has given it 99 points, I get that, but hey, is it really worth that much? Turns out if you lined up 16 regular bottles of the 2009 Margaux, it would cost you $88,000, but when they are all poured into a balthazar, the price goes up by $100,000-plus.

Why? It’s a case of rare multiplied by rare: this is the first time in the 400-year history of Chateau Margaux that wine has been bottled in a balthazar, a very limited edition of just six at that, of which three are for sale exclusively at Le Clos. Buy it and you get a “free” first-class flight to France, where you get to eat, drink and make merry with Château Margaux’s chief winemaker and managing director. It is beginning to sound like a bargain.

From France, we veer south, as in Down Under, to Moran’s third pick, a “vertical” of Penfolds Grange, the iconic wine from Australia. A vertical is a historical collection, and every year from 1951 (when Max Schubert, the legendary winemaker, made the first Grange batch) to 2010 is here, sitting pretty like an art installation in two wine refrigerators, side by side. We cut to the chase, and Moran announces the price, in Australian dollars this time—I suppose that’s one way to stay true to the spirit—and it is a tidy 660,000. At today’s exchange rates, that is almost half a million US dollars.

I take a moment to absorb that and peer again at the bottles with renewed reverence. What makes them so special? All of them are Shiraz except for the 1953 bottle, which is a Cabernet Sauvignon—a one-time-only Schubert experiment—and there are only a handful of them left in the world. What does it taste like, I wonder, and it is Moran’s turn to gasp. If only, he says, he would happily die for a sip.

We hop back to France for the fourth attraction, the Rhône Valley this time, a unique offering from Michel Chapoutier, the unorthodox genius of a winemaker who has shaken and stirred things up in France’s sedate wine world and sent quality soaring skywards ever since he took over the family winery in 1988. Here are six mathusalems of Chapoutier Ermitage 2010, three of them white, three red (a mathusalem, in case you are wondering, is a 6-litre bottle). This must be a phenomenal half-dozen to drink, for wine critic Robert Parker has given five of them 100 points, and the sixth doesn’t do too badly with 99.

But here’s the twist: They are sold out, apparently at a recent auction, so you can’t really buy them, unless you can find the owner and buy it off him. What price did it go for? I ask Moran. For once, he seems reluctant, saying the price is still to be disclosed. I ask if it’s $100,000? He is almost in distress, his eyes saying fat chance, you silly girl.

Time is running out for me, and we rush to the fifth pick, a sort of “flexible vertical” of Macallan fine single malt Scotch whiskies, an array of bottles starting from 1937 onwards. You don’t have to buy the whole lot; you can pick and choose. His stock has shrunk somewhat, Moran says apologetically, as last week he sold 19 bottles to one buyer. The most expensive one, a Macallan in a Lalique crystal decanter for $28,000, is sold out too.

I am sold out of time by then and make a dash for my flight, with a mental note to return to Le Clos next time—this is their flagship store at Terminal 3—and explore their not-so-astronomically priced collection.

Radha Chadha is one of Asia’s leading marketing and consumer insight experts. She is the author of the best-selling book The Cult Of The Luxury Brand: Inside Asia’s Love Affair With Luxury.

Also read | Radha Chadha’s previous Lounge columns