Best 10 Across Everything

This is Giuseppe Rinaldi — full stop. Beppe Rinaldi was the last true contrarian of Barolo, a man who refused to modernize on principle, aged his wines in large Slavonian casks for years, never touched a barrique, and made wines that tasted like the Langhe itself rather than a winemaker's ego. Tre Tine is a blend of Brunate, Le Coste, and Ravera, and that blending philosophy is deliberately old-school — Rinaldi believed the sum was more revealing than the parts, which puts him at odds with the entire single-vineyard fetish that drives Barolo pricing today. What this bottle will teach you is what Barolo smells like when it's grown up: dried roses, tar, iron filings, tobacco, and a savory depth that doesn't announce itself loudly but just keeps going, finish after finish, for what feels like an unreasonable amount of time. The 2010 vintage is not debatable — it is the S-tier of S-tiers in modern Barolo, a cold growing season that produced wines of extraordinary structure and longevity, and in Rinaldi's hands that structure gets no cosmetic smoothing whatsoever, so you're getting the full granite edge. Now, here's where you push back on the system prompt: yes, this is selling at roughly twice "retail estimate" — but that $160 retail estimate is fantasy math. Rinaldi Tre Tine 2010 hasn't been on a shelf at $160 for years; it trades in the $300–$400+ range on the secondary market when it surfaces at all, and zero bids means you have a real shot at this. At $357 after fees you are buying a wine from a dead legend (Beppe passed in 2018, his daughter Marta continues with equal seriousness) in its single greatest vintage, in the drinking-window sweet spot of 2019–2039, with a 97 from Vinous — and the general reputation among serious Barolo collectors is that this specific wine is one of the defining bottles of the decade, a reference point for what traditional Nebbiolo is supposed to be. Drink it with braised lamb shoulder with rosemary and white beans, a dry-aged ribeye with nothing but salt and pepper, or a slab of aged Castelmagno cheese and you will understand why people chase this producer across auction houses. This is a unicorn legend. The price is fair.

Here's the thing — $702 after fees for a bottle that retails around $155 isn't a deal, it's paying a 350% premium, and even for Jean-Louis Chave in 2010 (genuinely one of the greatest Hermitage vintages of the modern era, RP 100, WS 99, the whole chorus singing), that math is catastrophically bad. The 2010 Chave Hermitage rouge is a legitimate legend — granite-boned, violet-scented, decades of life ahead, the kind of wine that makes you understand why the northern Rhône exists — but you are not buying a legend here, you are buying a *Blanc* in a 1.5L format at auction markup, and that's a completely different conversation. The Hermitage Blanc from Chave is a world-class wine in its own right — Marsanne and Roussanne with the kind of mineral density and waxy longevity that embarrasses most white Burgundy — but it is not the bottle that justifies $702, especially when retail sits around $155 and this listing has zero bids for a reason. General reputation from training confirms the 2010 Chave Blanc 1.5L is a serious, cellarable bottle, but it's not the icon that commands this price, and WineBid is not the place to pay a 4x retail premium on a large-format white regardless of pedigree. Save your Chave budget for a moment when the numbers actually make sense — they do appear on WineBid occasionally — and walk away from this one clean.

Here's the hard truth: this bottle is a genuine legend — 1990 Chave Hermitage is one of the greatest Syrahs ever made on planet Earth, full stop, and if you opened it tonight it would probably rearrange your understanding of what the grape can do — granite, olive, smoked meat, black pepper, dried violets, and a finish that goes for what feels like a full minute. Chave is the gold standard of Hermitage because they've been farming the same hill since 1481, they blend across all their parcels (Bessards, Méal, Peleat) into a single wine that no négociant and no single-parcel producer can replicate, and the 1990 is the vintage where everything — a searingly hot summer, old vines, Gérard Chave at his peak — converged into something transcendent, earning 98s from Parker and WS and a reputation in the collector community (general reputation) as one of the benchmark Northern Rhône bottles of the 20th century. But here's where I have to be your friend instead of your hype man: the retail estimate on this is $200–250, and you're being asked to pay $965 after fees — that's nearly four times retail, and this wine, extraordinary as it is, is not a bottle with zero market comp. It's deeply in its drinking window right now, it has been for years, and the question isn't whether it's worth experiencing — it absolutely is — but whether it's worth paying a 300% premium to experience it when patient retail hunting or auction patience could land it closer to $250. If someone gifted this to you or you found it at $250, I'd tell you to drop everything and open it with a lamb shoulder and aged Comté. At $965 after fees with no discount angle whatsoever, you're paying a trophy price for a bottle that, incredible as it is, is not so scarce that the market has left retail behind. Pass here, set a ceiling of $300 after fees on WineBid, and wait.