Wine lovers and collectors watching the new Jon Hamm vehicle Your Friends & Neighbors on Apple TV+ took note of a very special cameo in episode 3: A bottle of white Burgundy, but not just any white Burgundy.
When Hamm’s character Andrew “Coop” Cooper—a hedge fund manager who has turned to robbing his rich neighbors to support his lifestyle after he loses his job—pilfers a bottle of wine from a friend who is a successful chef, it’s the sort of rarity that raises eyebrows even among people used to rare wines.
In the scene, Coop is checking out the contents of the chef’s house while the owners are out, but then his friend’s wife comes home unexpectedly—with her daughter's boyfriend!—forcing Coop to hide in a walk-in wine cellar. When the wife and boyfriend start having sex on the couch, Coop notices the rare bottle, picks it up and sneaks out while the couple is distracted.
The bottle is the grand cru Domaine d'Auvenay Chevalier-Montrachet 2013, which Coops says retails for $32,000 a bottle. During a quick montage of vineyards and the Burgundy estate’s owner, he explains the vineyards for the wine are farmed biodynamically, which he says is “horseshit” that makes “pretentious” enophiles pay tens of thousands for a bottle. (He is right that plenty of manure is involved in biodynamic farming as compost to improve soil health.)
Where Is Domaine d’Auvenay?
First, Domaine d’Auvenay is a winery in the prestigious French region of Burgundy, in the prime vineyard area known as the Côte d’Or (or the “Golden Slope”). The Côte d’Or is divided into two sections: the Côtes de Nuits in the north and the Côte de Beaune in the south.
D’Auvenay is based on a medieval farm above the small village of St.-Romain, in what is technically the Côte de Beaune. But as is typical of small Burgundy domaines, senior editor and Burgundy taster Bruce Sanderson explains, its vineyard holdings are spread across several appellations among six villages. The vineyards under the d'Auvenay label total just over 12 acres, most of that planted to white grapes. (If you prefer red wine to white, the domaine also makes Pinot Noir in the northern grands crus of Bonnes Mares and Mazis-Chambertin.)
What Is Chevalier-Montrachet and Why Is It a Big Deal?
The Burgundians have had somewhere around 2,000 years of winegrowing to study, determine and name the best sites for growing wine grapes—right down to small parcels. The Chevalier-Montrachet (“Knight of Montrachet”) bottling comes from a roughly 18-acre vineyard in the southern tip of the Côte de Beaune in the commune of Puligny-Montrachet. This area is best known for its white wines, made from Chardonnay.
Keep reading and you can impress the sommelier next time you dine out at a fancy restaurant! Chevalier-Montrachet is one of five grands crus—that’s the most prestigious designation in Burgundy for a vineyard site—on the hill of Montrachet and one of only two completely within the boundaries of Puligny-Montrachet. It’s the highest of the five crus, on prized, thin marl-limestone soils (Burgundians like to talk a lot about their soils, even more than most winegrowers); above it is forest and below it are the grands crus Montrachet and Batard-Montrachet below that. These sites make some of the most elite white wines in the world, able to age and improve for decades.
Other famous names that make wine from Chevalier-Montrachet include Bouchard Père & Fils, Philippe Colin, Domaine Leflaive, Louis Jadot and Ramonet, among many others. That's a lot of wineries for about 18 acres of land! Each has access to only small plots, even just rows of vines. In the case of d’Auvenay, the domaine has only 0.4 acres to work with. Now you get an idea of the wine’s scarcity and why it can be so expensive. Since 1988, d’Auvenay’s total annual production of all its wines has hovered between only 350 and 500 cases.
Who Owns Domaine d’Auvenay?
Domaine d'Auvenay is the personal estate of Burgundy legend Lalou Bize-Leroy, 93, who also owns Domaine Leroy, which she founded with purchases in 1988 and ’89, and her family's Maison Leroy, a négociant firm that dates to the late 1800s and where she began her career in the wine business with the 1955 vintage. Famously, from 1974 until a bitter split in 1992, she was also the co-director of Burgundy’s benchmark Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (which Wine Spectator deems to be “one of the world’s greatest vineyards”), in which her family bought a stake back in 1942. Today her daughter, Perrine Fenal, serves as co-director.
Bize-Leroy holds a portfolio of premiers crus and grands crus throughout Burgundy, and the wines, red and white, rank among the best in the world—able to be cellared for decades, even close to a century. Her style is built around low yields in the vineyards, a focus on expressing the site, relying on native yeasts for fermentation and maturing the wines in new oak. “The first impression is the fruit—rich, mouthfilling, concentrated fruit,” Sanderson explains of the Domaine Leroy wines. “They typically show beautiful balance, freshness, layers of complexity and length.”
Known as an uncompromising vigneron and a formidable taster, Bize-Leroy became one of the early proponents of biodynamic farming, committing fully to the methods from 1988 on, even in the face of severe threats to the crop. For her, biodynamics is a way of being, of thinking, not a method or a science. “We absolutely get to know, to understand more and more our land, our vines, the vines of each parcel, and that is something we will never finish understanding,” she explained in a 2015 cover story.
What Is the Wine Really Worth?
According to our calculations, the 2007 vintage of d'Auvenay Chevalier-Montrachet is among the most expensive wines ever sold at a commercial auction, coming in at No. 12! A 9-liter case sold for $240,412 at a late 2023 Sotheby’s sale of renowned Taiwanese wine collector Pierre Chen’s cellar. That’s about $1.36 per drop of wine!
Is any wine really worth that much? The 2012 Chevalier-Montrachet vintage, the most recent we reviewed, in a non-blind tasting, scored a whopping 98 points out of 100, and Sanderson described it this way: “From the creamy texture to the racy profile, this is classic Chevalier, with floral, apricot, mineral and lime blossom aromas and flavors. Savory, stony, intense and long, this is complete and electrifying. Best from 2020 to 2037.” The 2006 hit 97 points and Sanderson called it “Rich and creamy, opulent even, with great persistence on the finish,” adding it would be best through 2040. So, maybe?
Only 639 bottles, or about 53 cases, of the 2013 vintage were produced, according to Sotheby’s auction house. Though a wine like this pretty much sells out to collectors on release, a handful of specialty fine-wine retailers in New York City and Hong Kong have the 2013 vintage on offer from $20,000 for a pre-arrival (meaning the shop doesn’t have the wine in hand yet) to more than $33,000 per bottle.
Auctions are the place to look for older vintages of most rare wines, and even there, d’Auvenay doesn’t appear frequently. In November 2022, Christie’s auctioned off a bottle in Geneva for 17,500 Swiss francs, the equivalent of $21,237 today. And in a September 2024 sale of Pierre Chen’s wines, Sotheby’s sold a three-bottle lot of the 2013 for $56,250, or $18,750 per bottle.
So what does Coop do with a bottle that could potentially fetch enough to pay for his ex-wife’s monetary demands for the next several months at least? Well, we don’t want to spoil the episode for you, but it's probably not what you’d expect.
And if you’re seriously thinking about paying the price of a Nissan Versa or Kia Soul for a bottle of wine, make sure you buy from a reputable retailer in person or from a long-established auction house—not some random place you found on the Internet or a pawn shop.
So Why Does Coop Think Enophiles Are Pretentious?
Beats the hell out of us. When Unfiltered isn't sitting around drinking d'Auvenay and DRC with Bruce Sanderson ;-), we're combing our local wine shops for great values and pairing our weeknight dinners with a bottle for $20 or less. After all, wine is for everyone, as the ancient Trojans well knew!
—With additional reporting by Mitch Frank and Bruce Sanderson
