One champagne bottle was sold for US$ 2.5 million (about R$ 14 million), surpassing the record in a sparkling wine auction and probably becoming the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold in history.
But there is a curiosity: the magnum Chateau Avenue Foch , year 2017, comes with an NFT, which includes the digital art and intellectual property rights to an image of “Bored Ape Mutant” and other collectible cartoon figures that adorn the bottle. (One magnum is the equivalent of two full-size bottles.)
NFTs are digital images that are traded on the blockchain. The highly speculative market for them peaked in 2021 with $41 billion in sales, but has slowed sharply due to the recent drop in prices. cryptocurrencies .
The champagne buyers were the brothers Giovanni and Piero Buono . They are Italian cryptocurrency investors operating in the fashion and technology industries. Despite the cryptocurrency profile, the purchase was made in dollars, according to the seller.
The sale was first reported in The Wall Street Journal.
Shammi Shinh, the British businessman who ordered and sold the bottle, said he hoped the champagne effervescence could stimulate the NFT market at a time when he and other financial markets are substantially below their highs.
“I hope for more awareness – I want people to understand NFTs now,” Shinh said. According to him, the champagne and his collaboration with the artist Mig could be the first of a limited edition.
The Bored Ape Yacht Club token, launched last year by US startup Yuga Labs, is based on blockchain and represents a set of 10,000 computer-generated cartoons of monkeys.
Chateau Avenue Foch is a new brand. Champagne’s Premier Cru grapes were grown at Allouchery, a family-owned estate in Chamery.
Giovanni Buono said the brothers have no plans to open the bottle.
The purchase was made privately. In the public wine market, vintage bottles tend to have high prices.
In 2020, a bottle of the famous shipwrecked Heidsieck 1907 champagne sold for $275,000 in Moscow. En route to the Tsar in 1916, the story goes, the shipment was sunk by a German submarine and retrieved by Finnish divers decades later.
As for the most expensive wine of any kind at auction, a bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti was purchased by a collector in 2018 at a Sotheby’s sale in New York for $558,000. .
Source: CNN Brasil
