The 10 most expensive bottles of wine ever auctioned

Wine records are reported carelessly more often than any other collecting category, because three quite different things get called "a bottle": a standard 750ml bottle, a six-litre format that holds eight of them, and a charity lot where the price has stopped being a market price at all. The list below is ordered by what was actually paid, and each entry says which of the three it is. That distinction turns out to be the most useful thing on the page.

Each figure is the price reported at the time of the sale, with the house and the date, so it can be checked. Spirits are excluded, as are private sales.

1. The Setting 2019 "Glass Slipper" Napa Cabernet, six litres — $1,000,000

Sold at Carnivale du Vin, the Emeril Lagasse Foundation's benefit auction in New Orleans, in November 2021, and the most ever paid for a single bottle of wine at a charity auction. The producer made seventy-five cases of the wine and exactly one six-litre bottle, in collaboration with the owners of the Napa vineyard it came from. The buyer was Don Steiner, chief executive of a cost-management firm. That one lot raised about half of the entire live auction's total for the evening.

2. 1945 Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, Romanee-Conti, 750ml — $812,500

Acker, at its La Paulee sale in March 2026, and the record for a bottle sold on the open market. It came from the cellar of Robert Drouhin, the Burgundy negociant. The 1945 vintage was the last DRC made from the estate's original pre-phylloxera vines before they were pulled up and replanted in 1947, and only around six hundred bottles exist. This is the same physical bottle as the entry below.

3. 1945 Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, Romanee-Conti, 750ml — $558,000

Sotheby's, New York, October 2018, including buyer's premium. The estimate was thirty-two thousand dollars. It sold for roughly seventeen times that and held the world record for seven years, until its own buyer put it back into a saleroom.

4. 1992 Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignon, six-litre imperial — $500,000

The Napa Valley Wine Auction, June 2000, a charity sale. One of only two six-litre bottles made of Screaming Eagle's first vintage. The buyer, a retired Silicon Valley executive named Chase Bailey, outbid a couple who wanted it just as much, which is the entire mechanism of this list in a single lot.

5. 1945 Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, Romanee-Conti, 750ml — $496,000

A different bottle from the same Drouhin cellar, sold in the same Sotheby's session in October 2018, minutes before the one above. It broke the world record and then lost it before the session ended. The whole sale was a hundred lots, all sold.

6. 1971 Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, La Tache, methuselah — $325,000

Acker, March 2026, in the same three-day sale as the record bottle. A methuselah holds six litres, or eight standard bottles, which works out at about forty thousand dollars a bottle. The sale set more than four hundred individual price records.

7. 1945 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild, jeroboam — $310,700

Sotheby's, New York, February 2007. Only twenty-four jeroboams of the 1945 were filled, and this one came directly from Baroness Philippine de Rothschild's own cellar. It carries the V-for-Victory label commissioned to mark the end of the war, the first of the annual artist labels. It held the overall "most expensive bottle" title for eleven years.

8. 1947 Chateau Cheval Blanc, six-litre imperial — $304,375

Christie's, Geneva, November 2010, against an estimate of 150,000 to 250,000 dollars. Christie's believed it to be the only surviving imperial of the vintage. The 1947 had a famously difficult fermentation that left it with high volatile acidity, technically a fault, and it is nonetheless one of the most admired wines ever made in Bordeaux.

9. 1869 Chateau Lafite Rothschild, 750ml — $233,972

Sotheby's, Hong Kong, October 2010. Three bottles sold at that price each, all to the same telephone bidder, against an estimate of roughly five to eight thousand dollars apiece. They came from a consignment of 284 lots taken straight from the chateau's own cellars, which had never been moved. The sale as a whole made more than three times its top estimate.

10. 1787 Chateau Lafite, engraved "Th.J." — GBP 105,000

Christie's, London, December 1985, around 156,000 dollars at the time. It was sold as a bottle from Thomas Jefferson's cellar and bought for the Forbes collection, and it held the single-bottle record for twenty-two years. It is here as much as a warning as an achievement: the bottle came through the German dealer Hardy Rodenstock, the engraving was later argued in court to have been cut with modern tools, and the authenticity has never been settled. The most expensive bottle in the world for two decades may not have been what the catalogue said it was.

What this means for an evening in a village hall

The first thing to take from this list is the entry at the top. The highest price ever paid for a bottle of wine was not paid by a collector in Geneva; it was paid in a hotel ballroom in New Orleans, for charity, and it beat every commercial record by a margin that stood for years. People pay more when the money goes somewhere. That is not sentiment, it is a documented and repeated pattern, and it is the reason a benefit auction can outperform a dealer on the same object. There is more on structuring an evening around that on the page for charities and galas.

The second is that the two charity records were both for objects that could not otherwise be bought. One bottle of that size existed; two bottles of that Screaming Eagle existed. A donor who can offer something genuinely singular — a day in a workshop, a name on a building, a piece made for the night — will outperform a donor who offers a voucher, however generous the voucher is. When you are asking for donations, ask for the thing that has no comparable thing.

Third, look at the estimates. Thirty-two thousand dollars became 558,000. Five thousand became 234,000. Houses that have run wine sales for two centuries still open well below where they expect to end, because a low opening number is not a discount: it is what gets the first bid in early, and the first bid is what turns an object into a contest between two people. The guide works through how to set them for your own lots.

Fourth, three of these lots went to a single determined bidder who simply would not stop. Three identical bottles of 1869 Lafite went to one telephone. Your total does not depend on how many guests bid; it depends on whether, for each significant lot, there are two people in the room who both want it. A committee that knows its own guests can usually name those two in advance, which is an advantage no professional house has.

Last, all of it happened at the close. If a lot ends at a fixed second, the guest still deciding never gets to decide, which is why a late bid should extend the lot rather than end it. That, the countdown and the running total on the screen are covered on the how it works page, and the same logic applies to the paintings and objects described on the page for art auctions. You can build a lot list and rehearse a full evening before deciding whether to run it: there is a walk-through at getting started.

Prices as reported at the time of sale; figures include buyer's premium where the houses stated it.