This wine barrel may not actually be gilded, but it costs as
much as a gilded barrel might. It took a team of expert craftsmen from Lalique
glassworks over two years to construct the entirely crystal barrique (a smaller
vessel holding 225L of wine) in honor of the 400th birthday of Château
Lafaurie-Peyraguey.
In 2014, the Chairman and CEO of Lalique, Swiss businessman Silvio
Denz, acquired the 396-year-old Château in France’s Sauternes region. Denz
commissioned a crystal series by his glassworks business to honor the Château’s
upcoming quadricentennial celebrations; the series includes the barrel, a Semillon
(the varietal used in Sauternes) leaf, a bunch of (non-botrytised) grapes, and
a five-liter bottle.
Though the official cost of the barrel has not been
released, it is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands of euros. For
comparison, a typical oak barrel costs between $500-2000. The final crystal product
weighs a whopping 400 kilos and houses 300 bottles’ worth of the estate’s 2013
Premier Grand Cru Classé Sauternes, (one bottle of which retails between $55-80
in the US, according to Wine-Searcher).
As beautiful as it is, the barrel itself will have almost no
effect on the wine inside. Barrel ageing typically changes the wine by imparting
flavors and tannins from the oak itself and through the oxygen that passes
through the porous oak. The crystal barrique offers neither benefit; however,
the wine it holds had already been aged and bottled prior to being stored in
the crystal. Plus, it sure is beautiful.
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