Sip happens: Sangria with €120,000 worth of Petrus, anyone?

A video posted online has become the subject of numerous outraged comments. It shows patrons of a bar on the Côte d’Azur concocting a sangria with one of the world’s most expensive wines…

We’re officially 10 days away from the end of the summer, a season made all the better by the consumption of (responsible) amounts of sangria.
You know, that delicious Spanish / Portuguese export traditionally consisting of red wine, chopped fruit (apples, nectarines, berries are favourites), and sweetened with sugar, spices and orange juice.
Well this summer, an outlandish bunch with an all-too-literal reading of Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” took it upon themselves to bling up the punch. They have gone viral with an Instagram video that has received widespread condemnation.
The footage shows the partygoers on cloud wine at the La Guérite restaurant on Sainte-Marguerite island, off Cannes, carelessly pouring several bottles of vintage Petrus wine into a bowl to make a pricey €120,000 sangria.
In this economy? We’ll be damned!
As a reminder, Petrus is a red Bordeaux and considered as one of the world’s finest wines. It was served at the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten in 1947, with the future queen inviting Marie-Louise Loubat, the owner of the winery at the time, to her wedding. French wine magazine La Revue du Vin de France said this contributed to give Petrus “mythical” status.
To this day, only 30,000 bottles of Petrus are made a year.
The patrons cheered as they mixed Petrus with fruit and ice cubes – the two vintages in question appearing to be the 2006, with a €3,800 price tag, and the 2011, which costs about €3,200 a bottle.
Une publication partagée par Hugo Lafortune (@hugo_lafortune)
Since French newspaper La Figaro picked up the story, the video has provoked indignation. “Stupidity at its worst”; “You can be rich but have no class”; “I hesitate between stupidity and vulgarity” were some of the comments online. And as you can imagine, wine connoisseurs are rioting.
Philippe Faure-Brac, a renowned sommelier, told The Times that it was “like using a Picasso or a van Gogh to make a fire,” adding: “This is a wine with a gastronomic vocation par excellence. Why not taste it in a very festive way? But putting it in a sangria is not its vocation.”
Xavier Dinet, a wine merchant in Antibes, told French news outlet France 3 that it was a “profound lack of respect, above all for the people who made the wine.”
“There are winemakers who have worked hard all year to be able to bring out this bottle, and to mix it with oranges and all the rest to make a sangria, it’s a real shame.”
A shame for the grands crus, but hardly illegal. This is another case of sip happens when rich people want to create online buzz and end up confirming the old saying that a fool and their money are easily separated.
Plot twist: It could also be a not-so-subtle cinematic homage.
As Le Figaro points out, there are parallels to be drawn between the video and Éric Lavaine’s 2014 comedy Barbecue, in which a character is seen throwing a tantrum when he realizes that a bottle of Petrus is used during a cocktail party.
Maybe for their next video, the partygoers will recreate that scene in Annie Hall by chucking copious amounts of live lobsters into a massive boiling pot.
Oh God, we’re giving them ideas.
In the meantime, we recommend you limit your sangria reds to a nice bottle of Côtes-du-Rhône to better avoid all hell breaking juice.
Additional sources • Le Figaro, The Times, France 3