What determines the price of a great wine?

As with any luxury product, the price of a wine is simply determined by the law of supply and demand. As it happens, France's great wines have enjoyed a boom and an international reputation that has seen them grow in price to varying degrees for more than a century.

More specifically, here are the main factors

- The intrinsic quality of the wine, which is conditioned by a multitude of variables ranging from the intrinsic quality of the terroir and vines, to the know-how of the winemaker and the winemaking methods and techniques

- The reputation of the "brand", i.e. the château or winery itself. The grands crus benefit from a "brand image" which has a medium- to long-term influence on the price of their wines when they leave the château or winery

- The vintage. The vintage of a wine, corresponding to the year in which the grapes were harvested, has a strong influence on the intrinsic quality of the wine due to the variations in climate from one vintage to the next, having a more or less favourable impact on the quality of the raw material for this product

- Production. By a simple effect of supply and demand, the number of bottles produced by a château or estate in a given vintage will also influence the market. A château with lower production from one year to the next, for example, will tend to make its product rarer and therefore increase its price. This is a factor that obviously has to be correlated with the inherent climatic conditions of the vintage and the quality of the vinification in a given year.

There are other factors that influence the price of a grand cru to a greater or lesser extent, some of them more subjective and anecdotal, and all of them mean that the price of great wines can be quite volatile.