Jamie Goode: Are ‘icon’ wines worth it?

Are Icon Wines Worth It?  Can any wine justify a sticker price of R10 000, or are they all propped up by hype? How much is too much? When does the law of diminishing returns start to apply?

These are all good questions. I remember back in the early days of my website wineanorak when Greg Sherwood wrote an article for me about the outrage in South Africa when some wine estates started to charge 100 Rand for a bottle of wine. This would have been in 2000. 25 years later, this seems quite hilarious, with quite a few top South African wines in the R1000+ bracket.

What is an icon wine? I think it’s important to distinguish between wines that cost a lot because they are sought-after and come from famous regions and whose price has been set by the market, and wines that were intentionally priced very highly from the start. The fine wine market involves a roster of wines, largely from famous regions, which are regularly traded, and so it’s the market that sets the price for these. Think top Burgundies and classed growth Clarets. I don’t think we can call these fine wines unicorns, even if some of their prices seem a bit daft.

And we must be careful not to confuse icons with unicorns. A few months ago, I was recording Just Another Wine Podcast with Emily Harman and Doug Wregg, and Doug brought a unicorn wine for us to discuss. This was Sonorité du Vent 2019 from Domaine des Miroirs. It’s made by Kenjiro Kagami who has just three hectares of vines in the Grusse area of Jura. Kenjiro sells the wine at a reasonable price and it is offered to the trade in the UK by his importer for £60 (a few years back it was just £30). It’s eagerly snapped up and then the way that restaurants and retailers behave differs markedly. One London restaurant sells it for a very reasonable £150 on their list. But some retailers look and see how much this sells for on the secondary market and list it at over £1000. They justify this by saying this is the market price for the wine, so why shouldn’t they charge it? But it feels very wrong for someone other than the producer to be making this huge margin. It has become so expensive because it is very good, it is famous, and very little has been made, and now it is on the radar of rich collectors. I suspect Kenjiro is uncomfortable about the secondary market frenzy over his wines, which he sells at very reasonable prices.

Here we have the distinction between icons and unicorns, although both will be quite expensive. The icon is pre-meditated: the producer goes to the market with something they believe is noteworthy and of very high quality, and sets a high price. With the unicorn, the market decides that a small production wine is really amazing and then everyone tries to track it down. The resulting increased demand raises the price, sometimes even to bizarre levels.

So let’s think about some icons. Champagne is a region where top tier of wines from each house is deliberately very expensive. These are the prestige cuvées, and they fall into the category of icons because they are deliberately priced highly. It’s part of the business model. Have a non-vintage (with the rosé slightly more expensive), a Blanc de Blancs, a vintage (again with the rosé slightly more expensive), and then top things off with the prestige cuvée. Or you could be like Salon, or Krug, or Dom Pérignon and just make a prestige cuvée (and beyond, as Dom Pérignon do with their P2 and P3 concept wines, and Krug with their Clos d’Ambonnay). Then we have Armand de Brignac with their pricey metallized bottlings, created de novo entirely for the luxury goods market.

Another icon that’s worth discussing is Penfolds Grange. Back in the early 1990s you could still buy this wine quite affordably, and it was a safe bet for cellaring. First made in 1951, and released commercially with the following year’s wine, Grange is a multi-region blend and perhaps Australia’s most famous wine. From the mid-1990s the owners of this brand decided to reposition it as an icon wine, and the price went up dramatically. Now this wine plays very much in the luxury goods market. And on top of this, Penfolds have released some rather jump-the-shark concept wines such as the G3 and the bizarre ampoule wine, as well as cross-continent blends.

Napa Valley has quite a few icon wines, and of these the three most famous are Screaming Eagle, Harlan Estate and Opus One. The latter, in particular, is a great example of a big company positioning their top product as an icon wine. It’s famous and well known, and it tastes expensive, but to someone like me, a wine geek, it’s not something I’d particularly seek out or venerate.

Perhaps the most ambitious icon wine is from Bordeaux: the Liber Pater wine from Loïc Pasquet, which he released in 2019 at the rather striking price of €30 000 per bottle. This certainly put Pasquet on the map, and his narrative that he is recreating the taste of old Bordeaux is an intriguing one.

Is Portugal’s Barca Velha and icon wine? It’s very expensive, but has been made since the early 1950s. And the prices reflect genuine demand rather than a bold move on the part of the producer. A great example of a modern Portuguese icon is the Jupiter wine from Herdade do Rocim, which made waves when it was sold for €1000 a bottle, with zero track record. Its success allowed Rocim to buy some vineyards in the Dão region: Rocim sold out, and they made some 800 bottles, so you can do the sums. Claudio Martins worked with Rocim to make this wine as the first in a series of Wines from Another World. There have since been two more planet-named wines released in this series, from Priorat and the Mosel. Saturn, from Priorat, is €1700, while Uranus, from the Mosel, is a relative bargain at €900.

South Africa’s icons? There are a few. 4G Wines is a great example, satirised by Pieter Walser’s Blank Bottle Confessions of a White Glove Chaser: when buying grapes in 2013 he saw a group harvesting a block wearing white gloves, so he asked if he could buy the grapes closest to this for his own budget-friendly wine.

De Toren’s Book XVII is another. This sells for R3,995 a bottle in SA (or around £270 in the UK) and almost comically it comes in a cage, which you have to unlock to access the wine. And Brian Smith collaborated with Niels Verburg to make a Cabernet Franc which they named ‘The’ and sold for R5000 a bottle.

So are icon wines worth it? Not at all. Wine is a food, and I squirm when I see wine being taken into the luxury goods space. Personally, I will never buy extremely expensive wine, and that’s because there are so many insanely good wines available that are in my price range. But I’m not wealthy, and perhaps I’d think differently if I had lots of money to burn. Super-expensive wines are rarely mind-blowingly better than some wines costing much less, and often the icons aren’t wines I’d want to drink because to justify their prices they need to taste expensive to their prospective customer base. Wine is one of those product categories where spending more doesn’t necessarily get you anything better. Yes, if you go into a wine shop in South Africa with R300 as opposed to R100, you will be able to buy much better wines if you are smart enough, but if you go out with R10 000 as opposed to R1000, it’s unlikely you will be entering into a different realm of wine pleasure, and you might well end up with a wine you don’t like because it’s a try-hard bottle.

People should be able to charge what they want for their own wine, and if they price it crazy high and sell it, then good luck to them. But as a wine drinker, you are not missing out on much if you skip the icons.

• Jamie Goode is a London-based wine writer, lecturer, wine judge and book author. With a PhD in plant biology, he worked as a science editor, before starting wineanorak.com, one of the world’s most popular wine websites.