WHAT MAKES A WINE EXPENSIVE?

There's more to what makes a wine expensive than just the materials that made the wine. Sure, a $100 wine is much more expensive to make than a $10 wine. But is there such a big gap between a $100 wine and a $100,000 wine? What makes the world's most expensive wines so expensive?

Outside of the cost of production, there are a number of things that send wine prices skyrocketing. Prestige and collectability are the big two, with things like age, scarcity, and good old-fashioned trendiness feeding this.

On top of this, wines that get very high prices also often have a novelty factor that is only tangentially connected to the wine itself, distorting the idea of what makes wines expensive. The idea of the world's most expensive wine is almost impossible to quantify, as so much of the time, it isn't the wine's fault that it's so expensive.