Vintage wines that were collected by French president Jacques Chirac, while he was the mayor of Paris
will be auctioned off this fall. The 5,000 bottles include several 1990 Château Pétrus and 191 bottles of 1976 Krug Champagne. The sale is expected to bring in over $630,000. The bottles are kept in the Hôtel de Ville and government auditors decided that keeping the expensive wine was a liability because of the price and the possibility that the bottles could be damaged by a flood. Also, the current regime just isn't drinking the way Chirac's crowd used to. Both the amount of wine consumed and the amount of money allocated to the wine budget have been drastically reduced. It's a pretty strong statement regarding the French attitude toward wine in light of the recent years of plummeting French interest in wine and resulting poor sales.
