Jamie Goode: Are "Icon Wines" Worth the Price?

Can wines really justify a price tag of 10,000 Rand – or is it all hype? How much is too much? And when does the law of diminishing returns come into play?

These are legitimate questions. I remember the early days of my website wineanorak, when Greg Sherwood wrote an article for me about the uproar in South Africa when some wineries began pricing bottles at 100 Rand. That was back in 2000. Twenty-five years later, this seems almost funny, as many of South Africa's best wines now cost over 1000 Rand.

What exactly is an "Icon Wine"?

One should distinguish between wines that cost a lot due to demand, coming from famous regions and whose price is determined by the market – and those that have been intentionally priced very high from the outset. The fine wine market mainly consists of well-known regions with regularly traded wines – here, the market dictates the price. Think of premium Burgundies or classified Bordeaux. These are not "Unicorn Wines" (i.e., extreme rarities), even if their prices can sometimes seem absurd.

And "Icon Wines" should not be confused with "Unicorn Wines". A few months ago, I recorded an episode of the Just Another Wine Podcast with Emily Harman and Doug Wregg. Doug brought along a genuine Unicorn Wine: Sonorité du Vent 2019 from Domaine des Miroirs. Made by Kenjiro Kagami, who manages just three hectares of vines in Jura. He sells his wine at a fair price – around £60 in the UK (a few years ago it was only £30). But what happens next differs greatly: A London restaurant offers it for a fair £150, while retailers sell it – based on the secondary market – for over £1000. They justify it with "market price." Yet it feels wrong when the winemaker, not others, makes the majority of the profit. Kagami himself may not be entirely happy with this secondary market hype.

Here lies the distinction:

• The Icon Wine is designed as such from the beginning and priced high.
• The Unicorn Wine is "discovered" by the market, is extremely rare – and thus becomes expensive.

A good example of Icon Wines can be found in Champagne. Here, there are deliberately expensive prestige cuvées – a staple of the business model. Alongside the standard NV, the Blanc de Blancs, and the vintage, there is always the prestige cuvée. Houses like Salon, Krug, or Dom Pérignon focus directly on these luxury wines. Then there's Armand de Brignac, with its metallic bottles, designed specifically for the luxury market.

Another case: Penfolds Grange. In the early '90s, it was affordable and cellar-worthy, but by the mid-'90s, it had been "repositioned" as an Icon Wine – with a corresponding price jump. Today, it is firmly entrenched in the luxury market. Penfolds has also released additional prestige wines like G3 or an ampoule edition – along with intercontinental blends.

Napa Valley also produces icons: for example, Screaming Eagle, Harlan Estate, and Opus One. The latter is a prime example of an Icon Wine – intentionally positioned as a prestige product. It tastes "expensive," but as a wine enthusiast, I don't necessarily seek it out.

Perhaps the most ambitious Icon Wine: Liber Pater from Bordeaux, by Loïc Pasquet, first debuted in 2019 at a price of 30,000 € per bottle. His idea: to recreate the taste of old Bordeaux.

And Portugal? The classic Barca Velha is expensive, but has been established since the 1950s. Prices reflect genuine demand. In contrast, the modern Portuguese icon: Jupiter from Herdade do Rocim, launched at a price of 1000 € with no backstory. Rocim was able to buy new vineyards – 800 bottles sold out quickly. The "Wines from Another World" series continued: "Saturn" from Priorat costs 1700 €, and "Uranus" from Mosel runs to 900 €.

Now South Africa?

There are a few icons here as well. 4G Wines is a prime example – humorously parodied by Pieter Walsers Blank Bottle: Confessions of a White Glove Chaser. In 2013, he observed a harvest with white gloves and asked if he could have the adjacent grapes for his budget cuvée.

Also, De Toren’s Book XVII is an icon. The price: around R3,995 per bottle – packaged in a small cage that you have to open first. Or Brian Smith, who with Niels Verburg created a Cabernet Franc that they simply named "The" – price: R5000.

So, are Icon Wines worth their price? Honestly: no. Wine is a food product. And it bothers me when it drifts too much into the luxury segment. Personally, I would never buy extremely expensive wines – not just for financial reasons, but because there are so many fantastic wines available at reasonable prices. Super-expensive wines are rarely that much better to justify the price. Often, they taste "expensive" because they have to – not because they are better.

Yes, with R300 you can often get much better wine compared to R100 – if you choose wisely. But spending R10,000 instead of R1000 won't necessarily result in a heavenly wine experience – on the contrary, you risk acquiring a "desired" wine that you don't even enjoy.

Of course, everyone is free to price their own wine as they wish. If they sell it high – that's fine. But as a wine drinker, you miss nothing by leaving the icons aside.

Jamie Goode is a London-based wine author, lecturer, judge, and book author. With a PhD in plant biology, he was initially a science editor before founding wineanorak.com – one of the world's leading independent wine platforms.