Top wines are very expensive these days. It must make it tricky for anyone dealing with the production side: a small mistake could prove costly. You can’t afford to discard too many barrels of Grand Cru Burgundy, and you probably don’t want to be too picky in sorting the fruit.
I did a few back of the envelope calculations about the sums involved, to get an idea of the cost of each grape berry that goes into an expensive wine. I chose the most expensive current(ish)DRC wine available by the bottle on Berry Bros & Rudd’s website: it’s the 2010 La Tache, at £3328 per bottle.
So, working on the following assumptions:
- 1.6 g per berry
- 750 litres of wine per tonne of grapes (1000 kg)
- therefore 1 kg grapes produce one bottle
- therefore 625 grapes per bottle
This means that each grape that goes into this bottle is worth £5.32
Of course, it is worth less to the winery than this (retailer’s margin and taxes take up a good slice of the purchase price), but it’s still a lot of money that’s being dealt with in the vineyard and winery.
2 Comments on £5.32 per grape berry
A bunch of grapes, a syringe and a bottle of vodka….
I would be very surprised if top producers are squeezing 750 litres of wine out of one ton of grapes. Most of the press wine will probably not be used for the top cuvees. Even with the press fractions, we can typically expect to yield around 6-6,3 Hl from a ton of grapes, especially on something like Pinot Noir.