Bollinger Auctioning Very Rare 102 Year Old Bottle of Champagne

Sotheby’s in New York will be auctioning a recently discovered 102-year-old bottle of Bollinger Champagne on the 19th November, which will have a starting bid price of US$10,000.

The auction, ‘A Century of Champagne Bollinger’, will also include six rare lots of Bollinger Vieilles Vignes Françaises ranging from 1988 to 2002, all harvested from the Champagne region’s only vineyard resistant to phylloxera, the insect that destroyed many of the vineyards in France in the mid-19th century.

Rounding out the sale is a range of eight-year-old Bollinger R D Special Cuvée and non vintage Special Cuvée, available in a variety of bottle sizes from half-bottle to nebuchadnezzar.

The discovery of these secret bottles stored in the Bollinger cellars was discovered six years ago, when an intern was cleaning a dusty corner of the cellars and removed a few rows of empty bottles from a rack that was blocking a dark archway. He revealed a secret room filled with 600 vintage cuvées-all from the early 19th century to 1939.

The winner of the 1914 Bollinger will win an entire vacation-designed entirely to maximise their enjoyment of the rare bubbly.

First, the winner will be welcomed on a rare tour of the winery and the Galerie 1829 Champagne library. Then the winery will host a private tasting of the 1914 vintage with Bollinger Cellar Master Gilles Descôtes.

The winner will stay at the five-star hotel Château Les Crayères, in Reims and dine with the president of Champagne Bollinger, Jérôme Philipon, at the hotel’s restaurant, Le Parc.

According to the historians at Champagne Bollinger, the bottles were likely hidden at the beginning of World War II to avoid German pillaging, a common practice for anxious winemakers.

Many Champagne houses unearthed hidden rooms of wine in the years immediately following the war, but the 2010 discovery in the Bollinger cellars was the first of its kind in decades.

In total, 600 bottles were discovered ranging in age from 1830, the year after the winery’s start, to 1939, the beginning of World War II.