Old vintage wines: which years are still worth buying
Updated
Old vintage wines are bought on the year and won or lost on the bottle. The years still worth buying are the ones where a small crop built a wine with enough tannin to outlive its own cork, and where this particular bottle can be shown to have been kept cold. In Bordeaux the two reference points are(/guides/1945-bordeaux-vintage) and(/guides/1961-bordeaux-vintage), and a frost made both. Jeff Leve records a severe frost on 2 May 1945 that cut yields "quite dramatically, awarding the wines intensive concentration". A second frost struck at the end of May 1961, after which "there was no additional birth of new berries", leaving top estates on "11 hectoliters per hectare", according to The Wine Cellar Insider. Thick skins, low volume, high tannin. Past about twenty years, though, the vintage only sets the ceiling. Fill level, cork, capsule and chain of custody set the price.
On 28 March 2026 a single bottle of 1945 Romanée-Conti sold for $812,500 at Acker's La Paulée auction in New York, according to VinePair. It was the highest price ever paid for a bottle of wine at auction. iDealwine records it as the same bottle sold out of the personal cellar of Robert Drouhin in 2018, and puts the year's output at "only about 600 bottles" made from pre-phylloxera vines "which were pulled up in the same year". That earlier sale, per The Value, was $558,000 at Sotheby's New York on 13 October 2018. Scarcity is the part everyone repeats. It is not the part that kept the wine alive for eighty-one years.
What counts as an old vintage wine?
The trade draws its line at the closure rather than at a birthday, and roughly twenty years is where the line sits. Waddington's states plainly that "corks over 20 years old begin to lose their elasticity".
Read the published fill scales and the same threshold appears again and again. Waddington's calls top shoulder "Normal for any Bordeaux 15 years old or older", high shoulder "wine over 20 years old. Exceptional for pre-1950 wines", and mid shoulder "Not abnormal for wines 30 - 40 years of age". On sloping-necked bottles it allows far more: A 5 - 7 cm ullage in a 50-year-old Burgundy can be considered normal, indeed good for age. According to Sotheby's, its own top-shoulder band is the "usual level for wines or spirits over 15 years old".
So an old vintage wine, in the only sense that matters commercially, is one where the bottle has become a bigger variable than the vintage. That happens somewhere around a wine's twentieth birthday, and it is irreversible.
Which old vintages are still worth buying?
1945 and 1961 first, because both are documented rather than merely celebrated. After that, choose by what the year was built to do.
1945. Leve dates the frost to 2 May, then records heat reaching 98 degrees on 21 July and again on 17 September, with the harvest starting on 13 September "under drought like conditions, which insured naturally low yields of very concentrated berries". The wines began life with "massive levels of tannin", which is why he writes that many "still show well today" and that the best "could be even better when they hit one hundred years of age". His wine of the vintage is Château Mouton Rothschild. After the success of that 1945 label, artist-designed labels became a permanent fixture at the estate from 1946. Mouton was still a second growth then. It was elevated to first growth in 1973.
1961. July rain that "proved to exactly what the grapes needed", an August Leve calls "extremely hot and dry", a "close to perfect September", and a harvest from 22 September. The result: "small, ripe, sweet, ripe, thick skinned berries with almost unseen levels of concentration of intensity and flavor". Pomerol, Pauillac, St Julien and Pessac-Léognan carried the year; St Émilion and Sauternes did not, according to The Wine Cellar Insider. Leve now calls it "one of the true reference point vintages for mature, Bordeaux wine".
Beyond those two, Leve sorts collectible Bordeaux into two families, and the distinction is the buying decision. The structured years are "stunning wines with intensity, concentration, tannin and structure for serious aging" that are "not fun to drink early"; among the pre-1990 vintages he puts 1986, 1975, 1970, 1966, 1961, 1945 and 1928 there. The opulent years are "rich and concentrated" with tannins that are "silky smooth", and pre-1990 they include 1990, 1989, 1985, 1982, 1964, 1959, 1953, 1950, 1947 and 1929, according to The Wine Cellar Insider. The first family is where the surviving bottles live. The second is where the drinking is easier and the disappointments are quieter.
A vintage rating is a regional average, not a promise about your lot. Andrew Jefford's Bordeaux chart for the Wine Scholar Guild carries the caveat in its own legend: "Use the charts as a guide only; in every vintage there will be outperforming and underperforming wines." The same chart flags vintages as "Past peak", which is the marker worth checking before you commit. For the year-by-year drink calls on the modern era, our best Bordeaux vintages guide sets the two public charts side by side.
Why do a few old years last when most do not?
Two things, in order. The wine has to be built to last, and then nothing may happen to it for fifty years. The first is a matter of record. The second is a matter of trust, and it is where the money goes.
The Australian Wine Research Institute puts the storage envelope in numbers: keep bottled wine "with the cork in contact with the wine in a cool (15-20°C), dry location", and treat as damaging any storage place "where the temperature exceeds 25°C for long periods and 40°C for short periods". It singles out swings as their own problem: "Thermal cycling where the temperature varies significantly between day and night should be avoided." Dry air is the other trap, because "wines under natural closures can dry out and leakage can occur if the air is too dry", according to the Australian Wine Research Institute. On the argument collectors most enjoy having, the AWRI cites a study of a wooded Chardonnay and a Riesling over sixty months in which "bottle orientation (horizontal or upright) was shown to have little effect on the chemical composition and sensory properties".
Here is the asymmetry that should shape your bid. You can verify the vintage in thirty seconds. You cannot verify eighty years of somebody's cellar at all, which is why the visible proxies for storage, the fill level and the state of the capsule, carry so much weight in a mature lot. Our guide to ullage levels works through every band and what each house publishes against it.
How do you know an old bottle is real?
By checking the parts a forger has to source rather than print. Old vintages attract fakes because the people who could contradict the claim are dead.
Rudy Kurniawan, sentenced to ten years in a New York federal court in August 2014, worked almost entirely in this end of the market. He offered eight magnums of 1947 Château Lafleur when, on the evidence of the expert David Molyneux-Berry, only five magnums were produced. He sold six bottles of 1923 Domaine Georges Roumier Bonnes Mares, from a producer that "did not produce wine prior to 1924". He consigned Clos Saint-Denis with vintages "ranging from 1945 through 1971", and Laurent Ponsot confirmed the domaine had never made a Clos Saint-Denis before 1982. When FBI agents searched his house in March 2012 they found "inexpensive Napa wines with notes indicating they would be passed off as older vintages of Bordeaux, corks, stamps, labels, and other tools involved in counterfeiting wine". The documentary Sour Grapes states that as many as 10,000 of his counterfeit bottles may still be in private collections.
Three checks the catalogue itself gives you:
- The cork, not the label. Sotheby's defines a fully branded cork as one where "the producer, vineyard and vintage are legible on the cork", and a merely branded cork as one carrying "either the producer, wine and/or vintage". A label can be reprinted. A branded cork of the right age is harder work.
- The brackets. Square brackets in a Sotheby's lot mean a guess, not a fact: [] believed e.g. believed 1970.
- The format. Both Sotheby's and Waddington's note that up to 1978, jeroboams were generally bottled at 4.5 litres rather than 5. A pre-1978 Bordeaux jeroboam holding a round five litres is a question you should ask out loud.
One more thing to know about what silence covers: "Sotheby's does not comment on either back labels or importer labels."
What should you check in the catalogue before you bid?
Read the abbreviations as a condition report and the blanks as policy. Here is the shorthand you will actually meet on a mature lot.
| What you see | Who publishes it | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| (u. 3hs) | Sotheby's | "3 bottles ullaged to high shoulder" |
| (u. 2x5cm) | Sotheby's | "2 bottles ullaged 5 centimetres", on sloping-necked bottles, measured from the base of the cork |
| No level given | Sotheby's | "does not indicate levels under 3 cm in the necks of the bottles inspected" |
| Sotheby's | Believed 1970, not established | |
| owc / opc / nop | Sotheby's | Original wooden case / original presentation case / no original packaging |
| rc | Waddington's | Reserve château |
| ls. (low shoulder) | Waddington's | "Risky and usually only accepted for sale if wine or label exceptionally rare or interesting. JERO. JEROBOAM (BURGUNDY, CHAMPAGNE) = 3" |
| bs. (bottom shoulder) | Waddington's | "Not acceptable for sale unless a rare sort of bottle. Wine will usually be undrinkable" |
Then read the risk transfer, because on old wine it is total. Waddington's adds a special notice to its scale: levels "can change between cataloguing and sale", old corks "have also been known to fail during or after shipment", and "there is always a risk of cork failure with old wines and due allowance must be made for this. Under no circumstances can an adjustment of price or credit be made after delivery except under the terms of the warranty stated in the Conditions of Sale."
Due allowance means money. It comes off your maximum bid, not out of a complaint afterwards.
What does an old bottle cost after the hammer?
More than the hammer, and the gap is larger on old wine than on new. Single bottles carry the same fixed handling as a case, mature lots often need their own packing and insurance, and duty-paid delivery adds tax to a number that already includes the buyer's premium.
Work backwards instead. Decide what the bottle is worth to you standing on your table, then use the landed-cost calculator to find the hammer that produces it, with the buyer's premium and the rest of the fee stack itemised. Our fine wine market index shows where the mature end of the market is moving while you decide.
How should you store and open a bottle older than you are?
Cold, steady and dark, then upright the day before you pull the cork. The AWRI's 15-20°C band is the target; the swings matter as much as the peak.
For serving, the risk reverses. Pierre Mansour, Director of Wine at The Wine Society, tells you to stand the bottle upright the day before so the sediment settles, then to "decant fully mature reds just before serving". His colleague Marcel Orford-Williams supplies the cautionary tale: mature Hermitage La Chapelle 1989, decanted several hours ahead, arrived "totally oxidised, all three bottles!" With a Château Musar 1977 at a members' tasting, Mansour found "the optimum way to serve it was straight from the bottle into the glass". Old wine does not need air. It needs to not be given any.
Expect the cork itself to be work. Victoria Bull, Private Reserves Junior Buyer at Berry Bros. & Rudd, opened a 1945 Château Rauzan-Ségla and reported that "there needed to be no fewer than four of us to oversee the operation", using a Durand, the device that "combines the prongs of the butler's thief, and the helix of a traditional corkscrew".
Which old wines outside Bordeaux hold up best?
Fortified and botrytised wines, comfortably. They were made to survive in a way most dry reds were not.
Taylor's describes bottle-matured Vintage Port as wine that "will improve for many decades in the cellar" and is "among the most long-lasting of all wines". According to Taylor's, it is not filtered before bottling, so it forms a crust as it ages. On the sweet side, Lisa Perrotti-Brown MW tasted 32 vintages of Château d'Yquem back to 1876 and wrote that "Yquem is the only wine I’ve tasted many times and never had to conclude, "This bottle is dead." The" Her warning to buyers is about stamina: "it's easy to underestimate the wine's stamina by a decade or two when it comes to botrytized sweet wines like Sauternes. And for Château d'Yquem, that misjudgment window can be half a century or more." The 1876 was mute on opening and, twenty-four hours later, showed "the most gorgeous jasmine and chamomile tea perfume".
Old Burgundy is the opposite trade: the longest odds and the biggest prizes. Romanée-Conti sets the auction records, and Burgundy is also where the best-known forgeries were aimed, on tiny production runs from growers whose records are thin. If that is the hunt you want, start from the ground rather than the label with the Burgundy producer atlas.
Get told when the right old bottle appears, not after it sells
Mature lots are not a shopping trip. The bottle you want, at the fill you want, from a cellar you can trace, appears a handful of times a year and sells in an afternoon.
Set price alerts on your watchlist and we will tell you when one of your wines is catalogued, at what fill, and how that price compares with what the same wine and vintage has actually fetched at that condition. You get to decide with the fee stack already in the number, instead of finding out on the invoice. That is the whole edge on old vintage wines: the year is public, the bottle is not, and almost nobody prices the difference.