Wineaux: Brooding on a $250 bottle
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We drank a $250 wine last week. And we didn’t even know it. It’s a long and not exactly riveting story, so I won’t bother you with details. Let’s just say, the wine was good. Very good. But $250 worth of good? How would I know?
(To put this in perspective, wine maven Jancis Robinson writes that for Christmas she and her husband drank a bottle worth thousands. They purchased it, however, decades ago when it sold for only $700. They bought a case.)
We knew our wine had been expensive (maybe $60 we thought), certainly more than we’d ever spent on a bottle, and it occasioned several comments over the course of the meal. We speculated, for example, on the exact grape blend — and it was my next-day’s research into the blend that led to the discovery of the real price. But the wine didn’t elicit undue excitement while we were drinking it — and we were just as enthusiastic about the little dishes we were consuming.