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What a $600,000 Bottle of Wine Tells Us about World Peace

In our polarized time, food is how we all come back to the table

Romanée-Conti made history in 2018 when a bottle of Pinot Noir from its vineyard fetched nearly $600,000 (US) at a Sotheby’s auction. The bottle was one of only 600 produced in 1945. That year was transformative for the estate. The Nazi occupation of France had ended the summer before, and while wine production continued throughout the occupation, bottles from that period are exceedingly rare. The vineyard was uprooted shortly after producing its epic vintage and replanted two years later. Vines need to rest before producing a new grand cru–worthy crop, so nothing was bottled again until 1952. The bottle that sold at auction was more than just wine; it was drinkable history.

Why does a bottle of wine command such incredible value in our culture and economy? Why are we similarly unwilling to pay six figures for a glass of beer or a bowl of soup? Since ancient times, humans have been brewing and trading wine. We have evidence of wine dating back to 6000 BCE, when ancient people of what is now the country of Georgia stored it in qvevri, massive terracotta vessels.

Grapes are far from the only fruit that can be fermented into alcohol. You can make booze out of just about anything. Kumis is an alcoholic beverage made from mare’s milk that dates back to the ancient people of Central Asia. Using a horse as a biorefinery, they converted grasses into lactose, sugars in the milk, and then into ethanol.

But nothing really compares to grapes. Other brews need a prefix to identify their fruit, but grapes are ubiquitous to winemaking. And this may be owed to the grape’s long relationship with humanity. Tomatoes are a New World crop and were introduced to Europeans only after their exploration of South America. Grapes, on the other hand, originated in the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of the earliest civilizations. They’re one of the earliest domesticated fruits and, today, are one of the world’s most valuable crops. Global grape production was worth more than $92 billion (US) in 2023, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, making it the second most valuable fruit in global trade—second only to tomatoes at $116 billion (US).

Wine, in fact, is one of the earliest things we learned how to trade. The alcohol in wine is an important preservative, enabling the beverage to travel the long distances necessary to participate in a global economy, however small the world may once have been. The Uluburun shipwreck, a recovered trading ship from the late Bronze Age (circa 1300 BCE), contains evidence of wine being shipped across the Mediterranean, ferrying wine and other foods across what’s now Turkey.

The story of wine is ultimately the story of something larger: the discovery that value could travel.

To trade something, it needs to survive the voyage. Foods that could be preserved from an early time in human history have an advantage over ones that are either discovered late or difficult to store. They become economically important, so they entrench themselves as culturally important staples.

International trade brings a lot of value, and that’s as true today as it was 8,000 years ago. Trade allows people to access resources that might have been otherwise inaccessible and returns money and valuable goods that grow the economy back home, so whatever we value in international trade accrues additional importance domestically.

We see the outcomes of this in our modern day.........

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