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.
The 5,000-bottle cellar of French president Jacques Chirc brought in over $1.2 million at auction this week. The wines were collected by Chirac while he was mayor of Paris. The bottles which came from the city hall's grand wine cellar earned 961,030 euros ($1,212,147) easily besting the estimate of 700,000 euros. The high ticket items were two bottles of 1986 Romanee Conti (which never fails to hit big numbers) that went to Britain's Antique Wine Company for 5,000 euros each. The sale was ordered by Socialist Mayor Bertrand Delanoe because he was made aware the the collection could bring in big bucks.
