£49k – what it would cost you to buy the wines served at Rory McIlroy’s Masters Champions Dinner
Fancy recreating the Northern Irish golfer’s record-breaking evening? Decanter costs up the retail price of the four wines served.
Northern Irish golfer Rory McIlroy will defend his 2025 US Masters title at Georgia’s Augusta National, the tournament culminating this Sunday, 12 April.
But to ease the nerves before the first-round tee times on Thursday, he had the traditional winner’s honour of hosting Tuesday night’s Champions Dinner.
As is custom, the previous year’s winner not only designs the menu and chooses the wines, but also pays for the dinner – attended only by past Masters Champions (plus Augusta National Golf Club chairman Fred Ridley), all wearing their iconic winner’s green jackets.
The Mirror US, citing analysis from ratings platform Sportsbook Review, reports that the food component of McIlroy’s Champions Dinner is the most expensive ever recorded, at $318 (£236) a head.
For the 34 guests, that’s more than $10,812 (£8,032).
These are all sourced from Augusta National’s wine cellar, but chosen by McIlroy, who told media before Tuesday’s dinner that this was his ‘favourite part of the menu’.
McIlroy’s ‘intentional’ wine choices
‘I wanted to be really intentional with the wines,’ said McIlroy at a press conference, attended by Decanter’s sister title Golf Monthly.
‘It's something that I'm really into and passionate about, and started to collect wine probably over the past decade,’ he said.
‘To work with the sommeliers at the club and be able to choose these wines was a lot of fun.’
To go with appetisers of peach and ricotta flatbread, shrimp tempura, bacon-wrapped dates and grilled elk sliders, McIlroy chose Salon 2015 from the Le Mesnil-sur-Oger Grand Cru.
Arguably the most prestigious of Champagne’s Blanc de Blancs, this is the only wine Salon makes, and the 2015 is just the 45th vintage released in the house’s 120-year history.
Decanter’s Champagne correspondent Tom Hewson hasn’t yet reviewed the 2015, but scored the 2013 vintage 97 points.
For the first course of yellowfin tuna carpaccio with foie gras, McIlroy selected Domaine Leflaive’s Bâtard-Montrachet Grand Cru 2022.
Decanter’s Burgundy correspondent Charles Curtis MW rated this wine 96, remarking that it was ‘the wine’s finesse and elegance that makes it genuinely outstanding’.
‘It's the first-ever white wine that I actually liked,’ McIlroy told the press conference. ‘So to be able to serve that is something that's sort of important to me.’
Poignant Bordeaux pairings
Champions Dinner guests had a choice of wagyu filet mignon or seared salmon for the main course, each served with traditional Irish champ, brussels sprouts, carrots and crispy onions.
And McIlroy’s red wine pairing was especially poignant – Château Lafite Rothschild 1990.
‘That is the wine that I drank the night that I won the Masters, so obviously brings back some great memories,’ he said of the Pauillac first growth.
‘You know, [Irish golfer] Shane Lowry had a little bit to do with getting that wine, so I want to shout him out for that, too. But that will be amazing to serve,’ McIlroy told the media.
Decanter has three tasting notes on this legendary Bordeaux estate’s 1990 vintage, rated between 98 points and 95 points, each underlining that it is in a perfect drinking window now in its 36th year.
To go with the dessert course of sticky toffee pudding, McIlroy picked out a wine from his birth year: Chateau d’Yquem 1989.
‘Every great meal deserves to be finished off with Château d'Yquem,’ he told the press conference. ‘It is like liquid gold.’
Two Decanter experts agreed, rating this vintage 97 and a perfect 100 points, extolling it as ‘a masterclass in the layers and complexity that you find in fully mature Yquem’.
Buying McIlroy’s wine selection
But what would it cost you to replicate this wine selection at your next dinner party?
According to search engine and ecommerce marketplace Wine-searcher, the cheapest retail price per bottle, including tax and duty, for each of the wines in the UK are:
- Champagne Salon 2015 – £915 (Hedonism)
- Domaine Leflaive, Bâtard-Montrachet 2022 – £2,065 (Selfridges)
- Château Lafite Rothschild 1990 – £699 (Lay & Wheeler)
- Château d’Yquem 1989 – £425 (Huntsworth Wine Co)
That’s a total of £4,104 ($5,509).
As the Champions Dinner is a celebratory occasion, it’s likely the 34 guests would have been served large 250ml glasses (not the standard 150ml or small 125ml pours).
If that was indeed the case, then 12 bottles of each wine would have beed required to serve all 34 guests.
Which means one 250ml glass of each of the four wines would cost £1,368 ($1,836) a head.
And the total outlay for the wines, if you were to buy 12 bottles at the cheapest retail prices as listed above, is a staggering £49,248 ($66,114).
Thankfully McIlroy could afford to repeat this lavish occasion if he so wished – he took home $4.2m from his Masters victory last year.
The Masters Champions Dinner 2026 official photo, taken at the Augusta National Golf Course clubhouse, with host and 2025 Masters winner Rory McIlroy, seated centre.
New legends and old
McIlroy beat Justin Rose in a playoff in 2025, winning the Masters title on his 17th attempt, and becoming the sixth player to complete a career Grand Slam (The Masters, PGA Championship, US Open and The Open Championship).
The official Champions Dinner photo released by The Masters, shows McIlroy, seated centre, flanked by Augusta National Golf Club chairman Fred Ridley and two-time Masters winner Ben Crenshaw, who was the unofficial MC for the evening.
Of the 35 Masters Champions still living, 33 were present at the dinner, including six-time winner Jack Nicklaus, three-time winner Gary Player and other golfing luminaries, including two-time champs Scottie Scheffler, Nick Faldo, Tom Watson, Bernhard Langer, Jose Maria Olazabal and Bubba Watson.
Five-time champion Tiger Woods and three-time winner Phil Mickelson did not attend.
Two-time winner Ben Hogan started the annual tradition of the Masters Champions dinner in 1952, after his first victory in 1951.
