The Most Expensive Wine

Recently, I felt the need to search the Internet for what the most expensive wine in the world might be. I was not disappointed. The 2008 Aszú grape, sells for $40,000 a bottle. This article in Fortune details why the wine is so expensive. The Tokaji Essencia is made from grapes grown in the Carpathian foothills of northeastern Hungary. The wine is made entirely from the Aszú grape, each grape must be harvested by hand, it can take more than 400 pounds of grapes and 8 years for the fermentation to produce one bottle of this precious liquor. In addition, it's not just any Aszú grape, but grapes that have attained their high concentration of sugar due to the attack by the botrytis cinerea mold leading to "noble rot" that goes into the Essencia.

(Aside: In 2018 we let our grapes hang too long hoping for an increase in Brix and then the rains came. When harvest time arrived, we lost 2/3rds of our crop and the bunches that were left had a serious amount of rot which lead our friend to call this "ignoble rot". Funny guy!)
Given all the conditions necessary, in addition to cooperation from Mother Nature, the 2008 vintage yielded only 18 bottles of Tokaji Essencia. If you are ever served a 2008 Tokaji Essencia, don't expect to drink it from a glass, it will be served to you in a crystal spoon!
Why was I so interested in the most expensive wine in the world? Well, recently, we harvested our wedding bags that we put around part of our Chardonnay which we couldn't harvest. Our intention was to harvest these wedding bags so that we could make a late harvest wine like we did in 2019 Last Harvest of the Year, which took place on November 19, 2019.
Well, one thing lead to another and we weren't able to get out to the vineyard until December 11, 2020 and we lamented that we were probably one month too late to harvest these wedding bags. In October, the grapes looked beautiful in the wedding bags, but what we harvested was anything but. They were shrivelled, some were totally raisined, not at all promising.

But, waste not, want not, so we put all of the grapes from the wedding bags into a mash bag. We might have had about 5 pounds of grapes from 6 lugs of wedding bags, or approximately 300 bags of shrivelled grapes.

I was in charge of squeezing the mash bag. It was like getting liquid out of rocks, but in the end there was some juice that I could recover. What juice that was squeezed was put into a dessert bottle which we had nearby since we had been bottling.
The juice was almost black in color. I apologize since I didn't take a photo---what was I thinking? I put the juice in the refrigerator and when I looked at it the next day the larger particles had settled and the juice had clarified. That's when I took the Brix reading of the juice and it was off the scale of the refractometer. What I did was to carefully dilute a drop of juice with a drop of water and now, I had a reading of 19 ^oBrix. Since the dilution was one-to-one (this is by no means scientific!) I doubled the Brix to get a reading of 38 ^oBrix for the juice.
Next, I "racked" the juice from the dessert bottle leaving behind the heavy lees and put the clarified juice into a sparkling style bottle. Before putting the juice into the bottle, I sprinkled in a bit of QA23 yeast that we had lying around. Here is what I am now seeing:

The juice is definitely being fermented and the aroma from the "fermentation lock" is definitely honey sweet. It's an interesting experiment. If this isn't quite Tokaji Essencia, it's at least got to be Felix Felicis.
References;
1.Clay Dillow, Fortune, 2008 Tokaji Essencia, March 9, 2019.