It’s no surprise that excellent wines often come with high prices. But $40,000 for a bottle seems excessive. This is the price of the “most expensive wine in the world” – as the Royal Tokaji Essencia 2008 magnum decanter was described at its launch.
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While it may be difficult to taste, it certainly is, at the very least, the most expensive wine sold in 2019, according to CNN. The wine is naturally sweet and has a low alcohol content, which is uncommon.
The producers of the Hungarian wine say that their limited edition Essencia 2008 is worth every penny. There are only 20 bottles of 1.5 liters, with designs by artist James Carcass, and 18 of them were released last year. The box is lacquered and illuminates the handcrafted bottle. No two are alike – each one is unique.
If you think that with this price, the drink didn’t sell, you would be mistaken. Eleven bottles have already been sold. The wine has a shelf life until the year 2300. So, there is time to sell the remaining nine.
The flavor of the world’s most expensive wine
Essencia is made in the wine-producing region of Tokaj, northeast of Budapest, which produces sweet wines. The sweetness comes from a type of “noble rot” that dries the grapes on the vine, wrinkling them and making them look like raisins. Only the best aszú grapes are used for Essencia, which is made entirely from the juice of aszú berries (other wines produced in the region have a base wine added to dilute their sweetness).
Visitors can take private tours of the winery, which is about a 2-hour drive from Budapest, to taste it.
“Essencia is a nature’s miracle,” says Orsi Szentkiralyi, a Hungarian winemaker living in London. “It is very labor-intensive and requires many years of care in the cellar.” “It only reaches a few degrees of alcohol, but it has a lot of natural sweetness. It is so rich that it is usually served on a spoon instead of a glass.”
Essencia can only be produced in years with the perfect climate for noble rot. And 2008 was an impressive year.
It takes about one kilogram of incredibly ripe aszú grapes to produce just a teaspoon of the wine, while about 20 kilograms of withered aszú grapes are needed for a 37.5-centiliter bottle of wine, which usually contains about 3% alcohol.
“The decision of when to bottle an Essencia is always up to the producer,” explains Zoltan Kovacs, general manager of the Royal Tokaji Winery. “It can be after three, four years, or even ten. This Essencia [2008] was bottled after eight years of maturation. It is a somewhat unusual Essencia because it has a higher alcohol volume – about 4%.”
