World’s oldest champagne auctioned for record-setting prestige price

A bottle of Veuve Clicquot, among the world’s oldest champagnes, was auctioned for a record-setting price of €30,000 near where it was found in a shipwreck at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.

The nearly-200-year-old bottle was part of the booty from a shipwreck dating from between 1825 and 1830, and discovered last July on the seabed near Finland’s autonomous Aaland archipelago.

“This is an emotional bottle, because this is the wine of Madame Clicquot herself,” Fabienne Moreau, a historian for Veuve Clicquot, said, referring to Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin, the woman who ruled the famous house in the 19th century.

Mr Moreau, who has sampled the historic bubbly, said the record-setting auction price “proves the value of the wine and the prestige of the house”.

A bottle of champagne from the now-extinct house of Juglar, which was salvaged from the same wreck, sold for €24,000 in the same auction.

Mr Kapon said after the auction that a Singaporean buyer had bought both bottles.

The auction event included the sale of more than 40 other exclus-ive bottles from the cellars of Veuve Clicquot, each fetching more than €1,000.

The record-setting price was a victory for the province of Aaland, which is hoping to turn the champagne auction into an annual event to boost its visibility as a tourist and luxury destination.