For Leopard’s Leap joint wine venture with Nobel Peace Prize winner and former South African President FW de Klerk, we bottled Mr De Klerk’s Presidential Blend in magnum-sized bottles I was therefore interested to read a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article that big wine bottles are in vogue.
Below are a couple of paragraphs from the article.
“Connoisseurs—very rich connoisseurs—will pay big bucks for a case, even a bottle of a rare wine. But the biggest trophies at wine auctions are the so-called large format bottles…
“This March in Chicago, Hart Davis Wine Company auctions sold a single imperial of 1982 Lafite-Rothschild for nearly $42,000.
“The appeal of these bottles is clearly their impressive size: a magnum holds two regular, 750 ml bottles; a jeroboam, four; rehoboam, six; an imperial or Methuselah, eight; on up to a Nebuchadnezzar, 20. An added virtue is that these bottles are said to age more slowly because of the ratio of wine to oxygen in the neck.
“’People who entertain a large group frequently favor big bottles out of convenience,’ said Peter Meltzer, auction correspondent for Wine Spectator and author of ‘Keys to the Cellar: Strategies and Secrets of Wine Collecting’ in a phone interview. ‘In the fine wine auction world, sales of large format bottles are considered a reflection of the economy.’”