Only three bottle were known of the 1762 Gautier Cognac. The bottle pictured was auctioned by Bonhams in New York on April 30, 2014, selling to Polish company Wealth Solutions for US$59,500 and has subsequently been opened and its contents dispersed into a range of high-priced merchandise - watches, coins and fountain pens. Another of the bottles is now in the Gautier Museum and can be expected to remain there for the foreseeable future. The third and largest bottle will sell at auction on May 28, 2020. It is the only publicly available bottle of the world's oldest Cognac, and competition to own it is expected to be ferocious.
The only remaining bottle of the world’s oldest cognac will sell at auction next week, and will almost certainly set a new price record for a bottle of the famous French brandy. Like many of the world’s most expensive cognacs, the bottle of Gautier Cognac was made prior to the phylloxera plague that wiped out Europe’s grapevines in the late 19th century.
Indeed, this cognac has been authenticated as being a 1762 vintage Gautier Cognac, which means it was distilled 258 years ago during the reign of King Louis XV of France, nearly three decades before the French Revolution of 1789.
Three bottles (two small and one large) of the rare Gautier Cognac 1762 were discovered, having been held in the same family for generations with their original labels attached.
The bottles can been traced back to the 1880s at Lachaise, a town in the Cognac region of France, and were owned by the Donsir family. The glass bottle containers date from around 1840, at which time they were filled with a cognac distilled by Cognac House Gautier in 1762........MUCH MORE
