A bottle of extremely rare cognac from Maison Gautier, dating from the 18th century, was sold on Thursday for more than 118,000 pounds (131,000 euros) by Sotheby's, a record in this area, announced the auction house. It was an Asian private collector who won the precious stake for exactly 118,580 pounds, she said in a statement.
Called "Big Brother", it is one of the last three bottles of Gautier cognac from 1762 still existing today, and the largest. They have been in the same family for generations since the end of the 19th century, according to Sotheby's. They had been left with the seller's great-grandparents by an orphan, Alphonse, whom they had taken in with them. Alphonse had left his adoptive family in the 1870s to work in the Cognac region. He returned home a decade later with a load of bottles of this brandy, which would have been given to him as wages after the destruction of much of the vineyard by the phylloxera insect. Among them, the three Gautier bottles, with labels in perfect condition.
"She should still be able to drink herself"
Having gone to war in 1914, Alphonse never returned, continued the auction house. Like the "Big Brother", the "Little Brother" had been sold at auction in New York in 2014, while the "Little Sister" is kept at the Gautier Museum in south-west France. "She should still be able to drink herself," said Jonny Fowle, a spirit specialist at Sotheby's, in the Times before the bottle was sold on Thursday.
Drinks with a high alcohol content "keep very well", he added, without however excluding an "old bottle effect", which develops "sometimes very pleasant tropical notes, and sometimes less attractive notes assimilated to porridge ".