Fine wine collecting: a beginner’s guide to building your first cellar
Building a first wine cellar starts long before the first bottle goes in the rack. This guide covers Bordeaux and Burgundy’s classification systems, buying en primeur, the temperature and humidity a cellar needs, and why provenance matters more than any label. It ends with the simplest starting point: a mixed case and a proper record of where it came from.
2026-08-27
Rare vintage wine value: what determines a bottle’s worth to collectors
Why does one bottle of Romanée-Conti fetch $558,000 while another from the same vintage barely covers its own auction fees? Rare vintage wine value depends on a handful of provable factors collectors weigh before they bid: provenance, surviving rarity, the producer’s own reputation, condition and storage history, bottle format, and the critic scores that move demand long before the hammer falls.
Top 10 most expensive bottles of wine ever sold
Ten single bottles, from a record $812,500 Romanée-Conti 1945 to a Musigny by Domaine Leroy. Seven come from one small Burgundy domaine, and the bottle at the top set the world record twice over from the same cellar. Cases and barrels are excluded, and every price is verified against the auction houses’ own records rather than press reports.
2026-08-26
162 world records as historic Rothschild wine sale brings in $11 million
She was born into the Rothschild family, owners of the greatest vineyard in the world. Her wine collection was stored from inception and was unveiled to an $11 million sale.
2025-10-01
Billionaire bottle sale reaps $28.2 million wine-auction record
Fancy a drink? You’ll need serious money to take a taste from this extraordinary collection assembled by a US billionaire.
2025-06-26
$15 million wine sale is “once-in-a-generation” collection
Bill Kock is a legendary businessman and collector. His wine cellars are being emptied and may bring in at least $15 million in a three-day sale in New York.
