France’s famous Burgundy region has a double reason to celebrate, with a rare vintage from the area emerging as the world’s most expensive wine just after the region was named a UN world heritage site.
Richebourg Grand Cru sells for US$15,195 a bottle, according to the Wine-Searcher Web site list of the 50 most expensive vintages. The Web site’s table of the priciest wines includes 40 Burgundies, with just five non-French wines making the list — one from California, US and four from Germany.
The news comes after Burgundy’s vineyards were crowned in July with the world heritage distinction by the UN’s cultural body.
UNESCO recognized the uniqueness of the vineyards of the Cote de Nuits and the Cote de Beaune south of the city Dijon which produce some of the finest red wines in the world made from pinot noir and chardonnay grapes.
The Richebourg Grand Cru was a Cote de Nuits created by Henri Jayer, a winemaker widely considered a visionary in the business, who died in 2006 aged 84.
Jayer was opposed to using chemicals in the winemaking process and believed in small-scale production, turning out only about 3,500 bottles per year.
It is another Henri Jayer wine, the Cros-Parantoux Vosne-Romanee Premier Cru, which comes from a 1.01 hectare parcel, that grabs third place on the list at US$8,832 a bottle, according to Wine-Searcher, which updated its table earlier this month.
The Web site, founded in London in 1999, releases periodic updates to its 50 most expensive wines list, which is based on prices from nearly 55,000 wine merchants and producers around the world.
The analysis that produced the most recent update concerned more than 7 million wines of all vintages, taking an average price per bottle.
Romanee-Conti, Burgundy’s most famous fine wine, came in second on the list at US$13,314 and the vineyard has a total of six bottles on the table.
Other grand crus from Burgundy, such as Vosne-Romanee and Montrachet are also among the most expensive. France’s Bordeaux wine region, for all its prestige, has only two wines on the list, both Pomerols: the Petrus and a Le Pin.
Two German winemakers, Egon Mueller and Joh. Jos. Pruem, each have two wines on the list, including Mueller’s Scharzhofberger Riesling Trockenbeerenauslese demi-sec selling for US$6,630 a bottle in fourth place.
The only other non-French wine is Californian Stanley Kroenke’s Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignon, coming in at 14th place with a US$2,884 price tag.
Burgundy’s inclusion on UNESCO’s vaunted list may bring further economic benefits for the region, because as well as being a powerful tourist draw, world heritage sites are eligible for financial assistance toward preservation.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day