A two-bottle lot of Moet & Chandon Champagne from the 1914 vintage fetched 10,340 pounds ($16,620) at a Sotheby’s (BID) wine sale in London this week, exceeding the auction house’s presale estimate.
The historic lot was part of a vintage collection marking the Champagne house’s 270th anniversary. Bottles of Moet spanning the years from 2004 back to the start of World War I, and including 174 magnums and three jeroboams, fetched 147,333 pounds in total, according to Sotheby’s.
The auction came as the benchmark Liv-ex Fine Wine 50 Index has given up gains made in the first 10 weeks of the year, after investors deterred by prices of recent Bordeaux vintages sought alternatives outside the region. The Champagne, including the bottles from 1914, came direct from the cellars of Moet & Chandon, part of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA (MC), the world’s largest luxury goods company, Bloomberg informs.
“The harvest had to be brought forward because of the outbreak of the world war, which meant that in its youth the 1914 was quite austere and closed,” Jo Thornton, managing director of Moet Hennessy U.K. Ltd., said in an interview in London on Nov. 11. Champagne “tends to age for much more than people think. This will be drinking for years to come.”
