Bernard Arnault, a French businessman, is now estimated to be the world’s richest man according to the Forbes ranking. He has overtaken Elon Musk as a result of the dramatic drop in the Tesla share price and the strong performance of LVMH. Arnault’s net worth is estimated at $180 billion. That is $33 billion more than Musk’s. Arnault’s fortune is based on his stake in the French luxury conglomerate LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, or, more often, Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton). It includes fashion, luxury bags and accessories, perfume and cosmetics, jewelery and also wine and spirits.

The LVMH brand list reads like a catalog of the world’s top luxury products, Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Givenchy, Kenzo and others in fashion, selling for a total of €31 bn. Perfumes and cosmetics, including Guerlain, Acqua di Parma and the fashion brands’ perfume derivatives as well as many more, selling €6.7 bn. Bulgari, Tiffany & Co, Tag Heuer, Fred and others in watches and jewelery, with €9 bn. They own a number of retail outlets like Sephora, La Grande Epicerie/Le Bon Marché, Starboard Cruise Services etc., with sales of €11.8 bn. And finally, wines and spirits, which are mainly champagnes and cognac, selling €6 bn. They call their brands “houses”. (Numbers from 2021, according to the LVMH website.) The total turnover of the group was €64.2 billion in 2021. There’s also an “others” group of brands that includes several media, a yacht builder, hotels etc. ($1=€0.93, €1=$1.07) The most important part of the empire is Louis Vuitton that, according to The Economist, accounts for €20 billion turnover, a third of the total, with an operating margin of almost 50%.

But how much is $180 billion? It’s hard to make concrete. It’s an amount that makes shopping irrelevant. What does it matter what a new suit or a car costs? A new house? Not noticed. Even a super-luxury apartment in Paris of 600 m2 (6000 sqft) neighboring the Eiffel Tower is not even pocket money, currently on the market for €40 million (and he doesn’t really need it, he already owns a house of 2000 m2/4000 sqft a stone’s throw away). One of the world’s most expensive super-yachts is Abramovich’s the Eclipse, estimated by Architectural Digest to have a price tag of $1.5 billion – less than one per cent of Arnault’s net worth.

More comparable in size, perhaps: $180 bn is just a little less than the GDP of Ukraine (as it was before the war) or a touch more than Hungary’s. Or just under the market capitalization of McDonald’s or Nike. Or, since we were talking about buying a car, it’s more than twice the market cap of Mercedes Benz Group AG.

But we’re here for the wine.

Given the name of the group, LVMH, one might think that wine (M for Moët) and spirits (H for Hennessy) would make up a big part of the group, but that’s not the case. It accounts for less than ten per cent of revenue, as you can see from the breakdown above. But the group is still very dominant in each of the drinks market. The details are not always public, but there are various estimates.

Hennessy Cognac represents 46 % of all sales of cognac measured in volume (2019), the brandy from the south-west of France. This probably means at least €2 bn of sales today for Hennessy. There are some 270 cognac producers, but Hennessy is the biggest. Half of all cognac produced is actually sold in the USA.

In champagne, LVMH is not quite as dominant. But almost. A couple of years back, the then newly appointed head of the LVMH drinks business, Philippe Schaus, told me that a rough estimate was that the group stood for a quarter of all champagne produced measured in volume, but a third of all champagne if measured in value. The average price of an LVMH champagne is clearly higher than the average one produced.

The biggest champagne producer of all is Moët & Chandon, which is owned by LVMH. It is estimated to make around 30 million bottles, which might be an underestimate. That would be around 10% of the total production in the region of 300 million bottles. Moët used to have a prestige cuvée called Dom Pérignon. That has since a few years back, been profiled as a separate brand, independent from Moët, by LVMH and is estimated to make 5 million bottles annually. But the second biggest champagne brand in the LVMH stable is Veuve Clicquot, famous for its orange-colored label, with a production estimated to be around 12 million bottles. Other champagne brands in the LVMH portfolio include Krug, Ruinart and Mercier. A back-of-the-envelope calculation points to a total champagne turnover of perhaps 1.5-2 billion euros for LVMH.

LVMH also owns some wineries in other wine regions. Curiously, their wine holdings are mainly outside of France. Chandon makes sparkling wines on three different continents. Cape Mentelle in Australia, Cloudy Bay, one of the most famous New Zealand wineries, Joseph Phelps in Napa Valley recently acquired, Terrazas de Los Andes as well as Cheval des Andes in Argentina, and others. In France, they own some of the most famous estates, producing tiny quantities of very exclusive luxury wines, more luxury brands than actual wines: Château Cheval-Blanc and Château d’Yquem in Bordeaux, Clos des Lambrays in Burgundy and a few others. But these properties outside of Cognac and Champagne are small in comparison. It is a pity that – apparently – Arnault is not particularly fond of drinking wine, given the fabulously famous brands in his portfolio.

So when you popped the cork on one of those champagne bottles, from the list of names above, at New Year or your party, you contributed your money to keep the world’s wealthiest man in the top spot. He will appreciate it.

—Per Karlsson