World’s most expensive wine: the price of the 1945 Romanée-Conti

A 75 cl bottle, a Côte de Nuits estate, a post-war vintage: the 1945 Romanée-Conti has twice broken the world record for wine at auction, in 2018 and then in 2026. Here is its exact price, its provenance and what makes it unique.

How much does the 1945 Romanée-Conti cost?

On 28 March 2026, during the La Paulée sale organised by Acker in New York, lot 3148, a single bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti 1945 in its original case, sold for 812,500 dollars. According to Acker, this is the highest price ever paid for a bottle of wine at auction, and more than double its low estimate.

The bottle is not new to records. On 13 October 2018, at Sotheby’s in New York, it was sold for 558,000 dollars, including fees and taxes, against a high estimate of 32,000 dollars. A few minutes later, a second bottle of the same vintage and from the same cellar sold for 496,000 dollars. In eight years, the value of the record-breaking bottle has increased by approximately 46%.

The 1945 Romanée-Conti in figures

The last wine from the old vines

Romanée-Conti is a monopole: the estate is the sole owner of less than two hectares of hillside in Vosne-Romanée. Normally, it produces a few thousand bottles per year. In 1945, the harvest yielded only about six hundred bottles, as the old vines, exhausted and struck by phylloxera, were uprooted immediately after the harvest. The estate produced no Romanée-Conti from 1946 to 1951, while waiting for the new plantings to come into production.

Provenance matters as much as rarity. Robert Drouhin, long-time head of the Beaune maison Joseph Drouhin, kept these bottles in his personal cellar for decades. His collection of one hundred bottles, put up for sale by Sotheby’s in 2018, totalled more than seven million dollars.

Compared to other record bottles

In our ranking of the world’s most expensive wines and spirits, the 1945 Romanée-Conti is the most expensive wine, but not the most expensive bottle. The Macallan 1926 with a label signed by Valerio Adami was sold for 2,187,500 pounds at Sotheby’s London in November 2023. On the wine side, previous records were around 300,000 dollars: a jeroboam of 1945 Mouton Rothschild at Sotheby’s in 2007, and an imperial of 1947 Cheval Blanc at Christie’s in Geneva in 2010.

The price today

A 1945 Romanée-Conti cannot be found at a wine merchant: the few known bottles only circulate at auction, and each appearance sets a new price. The estate sells its recent vintages on allocation to a restricted circle of distributors, and they are then resold well above their release price. The March 2026 record now serves as a benchmark for any great bottle of Bourgogne.

Prices verified and updated on 13 October 2026. Sources: Acker (La Paulée sale results, New York, March 2026), Sotheby’s (sale of Robert Drouhin’s cellar, New York, 13 October 2018; sale of the Macallan 1926, London, November 2023), Christie’s.