Top 10 most expensive bottles of wine ever sold

Every wine in this list is a single bottle. Eight of the ten come from Burgundy, seven of those from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti alone, a producer that farms a handful of grand cru parcels and bottles a few thousand cases a year. Only two, both Château Lafite Rothschild, come from Bordeaux.

A bottle from a supermarket shelf and one that crosses an auction rostrum for six figures are, in the glass, sometimes barely different. What separates them is paperwork: an unbroken chain of ownership back to the producer, or to a named cellar such as that of Robert Drouhin. Without that trail, a genuine bottle from a great vintage is worth a fraction of the price.

Seven of the ten are large formats — Methuselahs, an Imperial, a Jeroboam. Wine ages more slowly in a big bottle, so collectors pay well beyond a simple multiple of the standard price for them. Cases and barrels are excluded here: a twelve-bottle lot at half a million dollars is not a half-million-dollar bottle, and the two figures are routinely confused.

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Top 10 most expensive bottles of wine ever sold

1. Romanée-Conti 1945, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (£611,788)

One 750ml bottle of the 1945 vintage, the last made from the domaine’s pre-phylloxera vines and one of roughly 600 produced, sold for $812,500 at Acker’s La Paulée auction in New York in March 2026. It came from the cellar of Robert Drouhin — and it is the same physical bottle that set the previous world record at Sotheby’s New York in October 2018, when it made $558,000. One bottle, two records, eight years apart, and a rise of close to half as much again.

2. Romanée-Conti 2000, one Methuselah (£296,240)

A Methuselah — six litres, the equivalent of eight standard bottles — of the 2000 vintage sold for $404,600 at Sotheby’s inaugural wine sale in France on 2 November 2021.

3. Romanée-Conti 2005, one Methuselah (£237,086)

The Pristine Burgundy Collection, a single-owner evening sale at Sotheby’s New York in June 2020, set three separate Methuselah records in a single session. The 2005 was the highest of them at $297,600. A Methuselah of Romanée-Conti is an unusual object in itself: the domaine bottles very few, and a collection holding three of them from consecutive vintages is rarer still, which is part of why one evening produced three records rather than one.

4. Romanée-Conti 2007, one Methuselah (£177,815)

The second of the three Methuselah records from the same June 2020 evening, at $223,200. The 2007 growing season was a difficult one across Burgundy, and the vintage does not carry the reputation of the 2005 either side of it. That the bottle still made over $220,000 says the money here follows format and provenance at least as closely as it follows the growing season.

5. Romanée-Conti 2006, one Methuselah (£167,936)

The third Methuselah record from that June 2020 evening, at $210,800. The whole collection totalled $5.14 million. The three Methuselahs alone accounted for $731,600 of it, close to one dollar in seven, from three bottles in a sale of many hundreds.

6. Château Lafite Rothschild 1959, one Imperial (£122,652)

An Imperial, six litres, of the 1959 vintage was the top lot of Zachys’ Direct From Cellar Auction with Château Lafite Rothschild, held at Le Bernardin Privé in New York on 30 March 2019. It made $160,550 against an estimate of $46,000 to $70,000. The sale was an unusual one: consigned direct from the château’s own cellars, it ran to 691 lots and set world records on 213 of them, finishing at $7,866,456. Bottles coming straight from the producer carry provenance no intermediate owner can match, and the bidding reflected it.

7. La Tâche 1971, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (£118,428)

A single 5.5-litre bottle of the 1971 La Tâche made $150,000 in Bonhams’ Iconic Wines from Passionate Collectors sale, which closed on 17 June 2024. Bonhams recorded it as the highest price paid for a single bottle of wine at the house anywhere in the world.

8. Romanée-Conti 1999, one Jeroboam (£116,029)

A three-litre Jeroboam of the 1999 vintage realised $155,350 as lot 1431 at Hart Davis Hart’s Finest and Rarest Auction in Chicago on 12 and 13 March 2026, a world record for the format and vintage. The two-day sale totalled $8,976,266 and sold every lot offered.

9. Château Lafite Rothschild 1869 (£94,348)

The same Zachys sale included one bottle of the 1869 vintage, offered with a dinner at Château Lafite Rothschild itself. It made $123,500 against an estimate of $13,000 to $20,000 — a reminder that part of what bidders buy at this level is access, not only liquid.

10. Musigny 2015, Domaine Leroy (£70,763)

One bottle of Lalou Bize-Leroy’s 2015 Musigny made $95,600 at Hart Davis Hart’s Celebration of Burgundy, 13 to 15 May 2026, an auction record for a single bottle of Domaine Leroy. Leroy farms its Musigny holding biodynamically at yields low enough that the parcel produces only a few hundred bottles in a good year. The sale, which was 100% sold, totalled $14.6 million and set further Leroy records along the way, including $41,825 for a single bottle of the 2012 Musigny.

Why the same few hectares keep resetting the record

Seven of these ten bottles carry the name Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, and the tenth comes from Domaine Leroy, whose founder was for years the domaine’s co-manager. Both work tiny holdings — the Romanée-Conti vineyard itself covers 1.8 hectares — and both release quantities that shrink further each year through breakage, poor storage and simple drinking.

The 1945 Romanée-Conti shows what that scarcity does to prices over time. The same bottle, from the same cellar, set the world record in 2018 and then broke its own record in 2026, gaining almost half as much again in eight years without moving further than a storage facility. While buyers in Hong Kong, mainland China and the United States compete for a supply that cannot grow, records resetting records looks less like a run of exceptional sales than the ordinary condition of this market.