What makes the most expensive wines so astronomically pricey? A house is the most expensive purchase most people make, followed possibly by a car: but for the price of a case of the world’s most famous Burgundy, Romanée-Conti Grand Cru 1990, its most prized year, you could buy a small flat or a Bentley. One bottle alone would set you back £15,702 (and rising); a case would cost a mere £188,424.

A great wine like Romanée-Conti Grand Cru is, of course, a great investment: but that’s surely not really the point. It is one of the greatest wines of all time, with an elegance, complexity, balance and concentration that makes it unforgettably special, produced by a domaine that has grown vines since 1232, first planted by Cistercian monks. (The vineyard’s reputation was unparalleled when it was seized, during the Terror, from the last Prince Conti in 1796.)

One factor that makes such wines so expensive is undoubtedly their scarcity: Romanée-Conti, for instance, comes from only 4.5 acres of land, yielding around only 600 cases each year. But their scarcity is a function of that mysterious, almost mystical factor, terroir. The word, which is untranslatable in less than a long sentence, refers to the natural environment in which the vines are planted.