DRC 1945. The Last Voice of Pre-War Burgundy
You can read the previous chapters here…
Chapter 5. Acker’s Auction, 2026
(Voice-over):
“My American seclusion lasted eight years, and now, under security escort, I arrived in New York. I never managed to see the Statue of Liberty, visit Wall Street where my potential future owners work, ride the New York subway, or visit the famous Museum of Modern Art. A pity. Who knows when I might ever get another chance?
Once again, I found myself in an auction hall: bright spotlights, camera flashes, the steady murmur of the crowd. Again, I was the ‘queen of the ball,’ the evening’s “bride.” Who would become my ‘chosen one’ tonight? Another anonymous buyer? Will I once again be unable to look directly into his eyes? And what if I do not like them? What then?
After all, he is prepared to pay an enormous amount of money for me, and living in America I have already learned what ‘dollars’ mean. Where will I have to move afterward? To what part of the world, to which continent? What new stamp will be placed into my passport—my provenance?
Perhaps I will return to Europe again. Or perhaps my path lies much farther away—to Asia. I cannot exclude the possibility that I may remain here, in America. But I know one thing for certain: my new owner definitely will not open me, just like the previous one.
How I miss the dear Drouhin family!”
I turned out to be right—my new owner remained anonymous, purchasing me over the phone. Modern technology has made even meetings unnecessary for seeing one another in person.
And I was also right that my value had increased considerably over that time. My new owner paid $812,500 for the privilege of owning me. The “hammer price” itself was approximately $650,000. The auction house commission was around $162,500—roughly 25% on top.
For Acker’s, I became the “goose that laid golden eggs.” (Perhaps their only regret was that there were so few such eggs.)
I became curious: how does my new owner see me? As a prestigious asset? A social trophy? A status symbol? A historical artifact? Or as a connection to 1945 and a touch of pre-war Europe?
As participation in my ‘eternal’ story? Or perhaps as an illusion of immortality?
But certainly not as a drink for pleasure.
Chapter 6. Counterfeits
Montage: in photographs from the discovered film archive—nonexistent bottles of DRC 1945 in large formats: magnums, jeroboams (3 liters), and even larger.
Only 608 bottles of DRC 1945 were ever produced, and exclusively in the standard 0.75-liter format.
Most of them were consumed long ago. Perhaps only a handful of authentic examples still lie somewhere in private collections.
Yet for decades, the market saw thousands of bottles labeled DRC 1945 in various formats.
That alone already looked absurd.
No one knows the exact number of counterfeits—whether crude or masterfully made. But in the professional world of rare wines, a cynical phrase has long existed:
“There are far fewer authentic bottles of 1945 Romanée-Conti than people convinced they have tasted one or own one.”
And that is not far from the truth.
Perhaps the most famous counterfeiter of this domaine—and specifically of the 1945 vintage—was the Indonesian citizen Rudy Kurniawan. He even earned the nickname “Dr. Conti” because of his obsession with the wines of this estate.
He blended cheap and old wines together, transferred them into old bottles, printed counterfeit labels, artificially aged both labels and corks, and sold everything through the world’s leading auction houses.
For a long time, the market believed him—partly because of his charisma, partly because rare Burgundy wines were poorly documented, provenance checks were weak, and wealthy collectors wanted to believe in the miracle of possession.
Bottles that never existed. As prices for the 1945 Romanée-Conti soared, the market became flooded with counterfeits—magnums, jeroboams, and other formats that Domaine de la Romanée-Conti never officially produced. The legend became so valuable that the market began counterfeiting the past itself
Suspicious bottles regularly surfaced at major auctions, in private collections, in the cellars of famous restaurants and wine boutiques, and among fine wine merchants. The process of forgery became virtually uncontrollable. Some lots were withdrawn at the last moment after complaints from producers and experts.
The story of DRC 1945 counterfeits is not merely about crime.
It is a story about human greed, obsession with owning rarity, and the desire to purchase vanished time itself.
Many acquired these bottles not to drink them, but to possess the legend.
And the fraudsters understood this perfectly—and profited from human passions.
(Voice-over):
“Here, they place a large-format bottle of Romanée-Conti 1945 on the table—a Jeroboam. The expert silently flips through archives and catalogues. His forehead wrinkles. In his eyes—utter astonishment and confusion.
— But nothing like this was ever bottled at the estate that year! Where could such a bottle possibly have come from?
And the greater the price of the legend became…
…the larger the bottles became as well.”
That is why, in this particular case, provenance and documented evidence of storage history became so critically important/
Chapter 7. Two Eras
(Voice-over):
“After 1945, new vines appeared in the Romanée-Conti vineyard. Young. Strong. Grafted onto American rootstock. People said it was still me.
Pause.
But was that really true? After my birth, hundreds of new Romanée-Contis appeared. But are they truly my relatives? Or merely very distant descendants?
Or perhaps simply companions. They are younger than I am. More beautiful. Healthier.
One name—different roots. On the left—the last pre-phylloxera Romanée-Conti vines that survived war and disease. On the right—the modern DRC vineyard, reborn after the great replanting
Pause.
We grew on the same soil, but they will never know how Burgundy smelled before the war.
The later generations of vines were born into another world. It is impossible to live through the twentieth century and remain unchanged
If the vines are replaced, if the roots are different, if the era is more advanced, if the people and technologies have changed—does such wine remain the same Romanée-Conti?
Some insisted that Romanée-Conti remained unchanged.
Pause.
I never argued. But sometimes it seemed to me that memory itself can alter taste.
After 1945, Romanée-Conti continued to live. But at times it felt to me as though it had become another life entirely.
Yet regardless, the wines of this estate remain the ‘Ferrari of the wine world.’”
Chapter 8. On Human Passion
(Voice-over):
“People have always loved possessing rare things—paintings, jewels, land. And sometimes even the destinies of others. But with time, they also wanted to possess the past.
Rare wines are the perfect object of desire. They are beautiful, finite, mortal, and impossible to reproduce. A painting may survive for centuries. Wine dies slowly inside the bottle.
Perhaps that is precisely why people are so afraid to open it.
Sometimes it seems to me that they no longer collect wine in the traditional sense. They are simply searching for a way to touch eternity.
The more expensive the bottle becomes, the less likely it is ever to be drunk
To keep me alive, people condemned my contents to eternal waiting. Each new owner believes they possess me. But people disappear, while I remain. It is not man who possesses me—I outlive him.
In eighty years, I will have had a third owner. (Though honestly, that is not so many.) Yet none of them managed to take me with them.
People call this ownership. But perhaps they are simply afraid to admit that time never belongs to anyone.”
Chapter 9. A Possible Future
…The year 2045. The DRC 1945 bottle turns one hundred years old.
What fate awaits it?
The next auction may take place in New York or Hong Kong. Or perhaps in Shanghai or Dubai. A new era of ultra-wealthy collectors has arrived.
(Voice-over):
“By the time I turned one hundred, people treated me far more carefully than they treated themselves. They still argued over how much I was worth. But no one any longer understood—or even wished to know—whether anything alive still remained inside me.
2045. An auction without people. Artificial intelligence now conducts the bidding. From the old world remain only the antique paddles, provenance records, and a bottle that has outlived nearly all of its owners
My owner had become my eighth master. By then, I had already grown accustomed to owners changing so frequently in recent years and accepted it as an inevitable attribute of the life of an old wine bottle.
Only one thing still interested me: would my fate fundamentally change with a new owner? Would someone finally open and taste me? Or would I remain an eternal mystery?
Sometimes I imagined it this way:
…A large room in the wine vault of my newest owner’s château. Several elderly collectors—his friends—have gathered there.
Ceremonial silence. A sommelier in white gloves and a tailcoat. Crystal glasses on the table. Reverent stillness.
The corkscrew slowly enters the cork. It begins to crumble. But finally, the quiet and familiar sound of the cork being drawn out is heard.
For one hundred years people waited for this moment—and could never decide whether they truly wanted it to arrive?
And now the wine is poured into glasses.
Is it alive?
Is it dead?
Is it vinegar?
Or a miracle born of Dionysus?
No one yet knows. But here, that no longer matters.
What matters is what people will feel when the legend ceases to be a mystery.
But I do not exclude another possible future:
…2045. A press conference in the elegant hall of an ultra-modern hotel. On the table, inside a special container, stands the coveted century-old bottle of DRC. I have been sold once again, yet I remain sealed. By then, people are simply afraid to open me.
The older I became, the fewer people cared who I truly was?
Perhaps there is nothing left inside me anymore. But myths, too, know how to age. By my centenary, people had completely stopped buying wine in me. They were purchasing the right to touch someone else’s memory. A status trophy.
Perhaps someone wishes to know how my story ends. But no one today can know exactly how it will unfold in 2045. Simply because that year has not yet arrived.
And will my story even end then? I may continue to live beyond it. Why not for two hundred years? Perhaps forever—unlike my owners, whose lifespans are finite.
Sometimes I wished I could see Robert Drouhin again—the man under whom I was born—and speak with him! I remember him as a very calm, slightly tired man who spent his entire life preserving and loving wine. I can vividly imagine what he would say to me:
— Strange creatures, people…We made and preserved this wine so that one day it could be opened at the table. To warm conversations. To bring people together. And they turned it into a string of zeros on a screen in the age of algorithmic trading. One hundred years… and still no one dared to discover what you actually taste like?
— They were afraid of losing me.
— No. They were afraid the legend would end and time would stop ticking. They preserved not the wine itself, but the possibility of dreaming about it.
Wine lives only when it is drunk. Everything else is already memory
Bottles were not created for eternity. For eternity, people have invented museums.
For me, the important thing is an empty bottle left on the table after a warm dinner among friends, not a climate-controlled capsule and a holographic provenance.
Chapter 10. Time as Destroyer… and Creator of Value
Most things age predictably: cars rust, technology becomes obsolete, clothes wear out, food spoils.
Time usually destroys value.
But great wines obey another logic. The closer they come to their own death, the more expensive they become. And there is something almost unnatural about that.
1945. Inside the bottle, there was less and less wine—and more and more time
The collector purchases an object that is physically disappearing before his eyes. Slowly. Irreversibly. Year after year.
That is why a great old wine can never truly be a completely ‘stable asset.’ Mortality is embedded in its nature.
“I was dying slowly. And that was precisely what made me more valuable.”
Pause.
“People did not pay for my youth. Nor even for my taste. They paid for the rarity of a moment that could never be repeated.”
Owning time. In the silence of secured vaults, great wines slowly cease to be beverages. They become objects of memory, waiting, and humanity’s desire to hold on to something that never truly belongs to anyone
Perhaps this is where the boundary between wine and art truly lies. A painting may survive centuries almost unchanged. But a great wine ages alongside humanity.
And one day disappears.
Chapter 11. The Collector’s Paradox
Wine exists in order to be drunk.
That is its meaning. Its purpose. It’s a form of life.
Wine is created for the moment between people: dinner, conversation, memory, celebration, love, reconciliation.
But the more expensive the bottle becomes, the more frightening it is to open.
The paradox of collecting is that preserving the object gradually destroys its original meaning.
A vault for time. Modern collectors increasingly store great wines not in traditional cellars, but in secured freeports. Here, bottles become at once luxury objects, financial assets, and relics of the past
If the bottle is opened—the legend ends.
If it remains unopened—the wine never fulfills its purpose
That is why the world’s most expensive bottles often become the loneliest.
They live not on tables, but in storage vaults.
Not among friends, but among insurance papers, climate systems, and financial assets.
Perhaps collectors are not truly preserving the wine itself. But rather the right to open it one day.
🎞️ …A dimly lit tasting room
Silence. On the table—a bottle of Romanée-Conti 1945. The sommelier slowly lifts it toward a narrow beam of light. For a long time, he peers through the glass, as though trying to see not wine, but time itself.
Until the bottle is opened, the time inside it has not yet ended
Pause.
Then quietly says:
— The wine may already be dead. But as a collectible object—it survived.
No one in the room replies. Because everyone understands: perhaps there has long been no great wine left inside.
Yet by this point, the bottle itself has become something greater than its contents. It has outlived its vines, its creators, its owners, its eras, and even its own original purpose.
“To preserve me as a legend, people were forced to abandon the very reason I came into existence.
Chapter 12. The Sealed Bottle as the Perfect Legend
As long as the bottle remains sealed—no one knows the truth.
Inside there may be: the greatest wine of the twentieth century, the final voice of pre-war Burgundy, a miracle that survived time. Or—dead liquid. Vinegar. The sediment of history. Complete disappointment.
But until the cork is pulled, both possibilities remain alive at once.
It is uncertainty itself that keeps the legend alive.
An opened bottle provides an answer. A sealed bottle preserves imagination.
Perhaps people are afraid to open such wines not because they wish to preserve money. But because they fear destroying their own dream.
For once opened, myth becomes reality.
And reality is almost always smaller than legend.
The greatest bottles were never meant to live forever
“As long as I remained unopened, I could be anything. But no one wished to know the answer too early.”
The value here rests not on knowledge, but on the impossibility of knowing
Chapter 13. Time as a Filter of Authenticity
At first, time destroys traces: invoices disappear, archives are lost, owners die, labels age, corks crumble, inscriptions fade. And alongside this, the space for forgery expands.
That is precisely why provenance becomes almost sacred.
If a bottle survives decades, preserves a documented chain of ownership, avoids forgery, remains recognizable, and its history can still be traced through evidence and records—then time itself begins to confirm its authenticity.
Sometimes great wines are valued not only for what they once were. But because their story managed not to disappear
…The credits rolled across the screen, and the lights came up in the hall.
The audience rose from their seats…
And only the bottle still remained silent about the most important thing of all—what had it truly tasted like?
In the end, there were no bottles, no owners, no auction records left. Only the land of Burgundy remained—the same land where everything had once begun
To be continued…
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