170-Year-Old Champagne Sells For Over $156K

Jay-Z may be popping Ace Of Spades, but those gold bottles don't compare to the world's oldest bubbly that sold (via auction) on Friday (June 8) for over six figures.
According to Bloomberg, 11 bottles of champagne sold at an auction in Finland on Friday for more than $156,000.
The bottles were the oldest in the world, because they've been sitting on the bottom of the sea for 170 years. Six bottles were Juglar, a long-defunct Champagne house that disappeared in 1829; four were Veuve Clicquot; and one was Heidsieck.

The Champagne was reportedly stored horizontally in cold, dark Baltic waters after a shipwreck. Divers exploring the wreck of a schooner discovered a total of 162 bottles in 2010. Of them, 79 were drinkable. Aaland, an archipelago of 6,500 islands between Finland and Sweden, plans to retain some bottles and to sell others for maritime archaeology and for Baltic Sea environmental projects.
"We didn't know what we had found at first"," said diver Christian Ekstroem, who manages the pub in the Stallhagen brewery, outside Mariehamn (the only town in Aaland). "I brought a bottle up and the closer I got to the surface, I had to hold the cork down with my thumb. It popped when I was in the boat, so we poured some into cups. We had no idea how valuable it was."
Ekstroem tells Bloomberg that wrecks more than 100 years old belong to the government, and none of the eight divers who discovered the champagne has received any compensation.
"I sipped the Juglar when I first visited Aaland in November 2010, when two bottles were opened for tasting. It’s aromatic and sweet, like a dessert wine, and it’s deep and rich, with notes of orange and raisin, like a Christmas cake," Bloomberg writer Richard Vines writes.
The Veuve Clicquot (MC) sold for a world record for a single bottle of champagne of 30,000 euros at auction in Mariehamn on June 3 last year. A bottle of Juglar went for 24,000 euros.