Charles and Diana’s rare wedding champagne to be auctioned

A bottle of champagne from the 1981 wedding of then Prince Charles and Princess Diana will go under the hammer this month in Denmark. Photo / Camille Bas-Wohlert, AFP

One of 12 bottles of champagne from the 1981 wedding of Prince Charles (now King Charles III) and Princess Diana will go under the hammer this month in Denmark.

The bottles were created and labelled to mark the British royal wedding watched by hundreds of millions around the world.

“Only 12 magnum bottles were made, and this is one of them,” said Thomas Rosendahl Andersen, wine expert at Bruun Rasmussen auction house.

The magnum of 1961 Dom Perignon Vintage could fetch between 500,000 and 600,000 Danish kroner ($135,000 and $162,000) at the December 11 auction in a Copenhagen suburb, the auction house said.

Rosendahl said the bottle would appeal to both wine enthusiasts and collectors of royal memorabilia.

“You can absolutely drink it. Every bottle of wine we sell at auction is examined and inspected,” said Rosendahl.

“For something like this, we check many different things, including shining light through the bottle to ensure that the contents, the wine itself, have a very nice and clear colour, and are not brown and cloudy.”

The current owner of the magnum, a collector who does not want his identity to be made public, obtained the bottle from a London dealer.

Champagne from the wedding has not always proved a hit with collectors – a magnum failed to find a buyer at a British auction in 2004. However, four years later, another fetched around US$12,000.

-Agence France-Presse