The Most Expensive Wine in the World (2024)

The Most Expensive Wine in the World

On January 1, The Most Expensive Wine in the World will be shown and anyone can watch it. It is set for general release in the New Year, but readers of Wine-Searcher can see it now and at a discount by following an exclusive link at the end of this story.

The 51-minute documentary tells the Liber Pater story: how a former engineering student started making wine in an unsung corner of Bordeaux and ended up with a wine that had the highest ever release price.

Directed by Klaas de Jong, who has won awards for his short films, the documentary focuses on Loïc Pasquet, founder and winemaker at Liber Pater, with contributions from well-known wine names such as Jane Anson and Jacky Rigaux among others.

It retraces Pasquet’s battles to get his wine through Bordeaux’s and France’s rigid wine rules; struggles that saw him mocked, abused, fined and finally brought to court by increasingly incensed wine authorities. Small wonder he doesn’t think much of them. And he thinks Bordeaux sold its soul to changing tastes one man’s tastes in particular: Robert Parker.

“Owners of châteaux in difficulties in the late ’80s saw this guy who was saying he’d push the wines in the USA, so they produced the wines that he would like. But again, the issue is not Parker; he had the right to say he liked this or that,” Pasquet told Wine-Searcher in a 2019 interview.

“Then Merlot arrived massively, which is known as Robert Parker’s favourite grape variety. The only grape variety that reaches over maturity and provides sweetness and alcohol, with wood for vanilla and sweetness. The issue is not critic but producer who agrees to lose fine wine taste to build full bodied wines based on grape variety’s characteristicsm, And some vineyards pulled up century-old vines to plant Merlot. Before Parker, cooperages were dying. Remember, there was a 200-percent barrel trend for a while, which is hysterical. The drama is that Bordeaux has the terroirs, has the wine culture to produce fine wines, but it is also a commercial place, with the capacity to produce wines for a specific taste too far from the terroir.”

After being punished for his plantings (30,000 vines per hectare instead of 5-10,000), using ungrafted vines and using grape varieties that fall outside the rules currently applied to Bordeaux (although he makes clear that they are all traditional Bordeaux varieties), Pasquet took his revenge in novel fashion: he made a wine labelled as Vin de France, the country’s most basic appellation tier and sold it for $33,000/bottle, smashing through the patrician First Growths whose release prices rarely exceed $1000. He is still not satisfied with the authorities though.

“They are partners of a mafia, of a mediocrity. They do not understand what we call “a sense of place”. The old people understood that, grapes should resemble the place they are grown from. Now hybrids. In Bordeaux today it’s soup, a blend based on the qualities of grape varieties; we look for percentage of Merlot, Cabernet with the taste of grape but that is not fine wine. Fine wine is what I am making and Burgundians too, where it is terroir that tells us what grapes to grow. Cabernet on three terroirs can have three tastes and you wouldn’t recognize them. That’s what I’m fighting against.”

Pasquet’s story is this documentary a story about one stubborn person who had an idea that led him to create one of the most extraordinary wines ever made. This will be released on January 1st by WineMasters.tv as well as through iTunes/Apple TV, Google Play and Amazon and you can watch it before anyone else does so at a discounted price from Wine Searcher and WineMasters.tv!

Watch The Most Expensive Wine in the World For Free On Gomovies.