Ship wrecked wine fetches record price at auction

A 200-year-old bottle of Champagne recovered from a Baltic shipwreck has fetched a record price at auction. It was sold to an anonymous bidder from Singapore for €30,000 (£26,700) by New York auction house Acker Merrall and Condit last Friday in Marieham. The same buyer paid €24,000 for another bottle of Champagne from the cache, from the now defunct Juglar house. The champagne was part of a cache of 168 bottles found last summer in a wrecked schooner dating from 1825-30 in Finland's Åland archipelago.

While the auction house claims the price paid for the Veuve Clicquot is a record, this has not been independently confirmed. Acker has claimed previous records for rare Champagne: in March 2009 it sold a bottle of 1928 Krug in Hong Kong for HK$164,560 (€15,900), and in 2008 two bottles of Dom Perignon Rosé 1959 were sold for £43,000, or about €27,600 each.