Chateau Avenue Foch Magnum 2017 became the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold
A article posted on Wines of Romania The previous week reviewed the top most expensive champagnes in the world in 2022. As luck would have it, a magnum bottle of 2017 Chateau Avenue Foch champagne sold for $2.5 million last weekend at an auction in New York, breaking the previous auction record and becoming the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold with proper documentation.
At first glance, the obscene amount is unjustified, Chateau Avenue Foch being a new brand on the market. The Premier Cru grapes of Champagne were grown at Allouchery, a family estate in Chamery. What, then, would be the reason why two Italian brothers, Giovanni and Piero Buono – cryptocurrency investors – would pay this unimaginable amount for a bottle of champagne?
The 2017 Chateau Avenue Foch magnum sold along with a Non-fungible token (NFT) that includes digital art and intellectual property rights to an image of the character "Bored Ape Mutant", as well as several other collectible cartoon characters adorning the bottle.
For the uninitiated, it should be mentioned that NFTs are digital images, specifically a type of cryptocurrency token that trades on a blockchain. Their market is highly speculative. In 2021, trading in this market reached an all-time high, with sales totaling $41 billion. In 2022, however, transactions fell dramatically, mainly due to the cryptocurrency crash.
The glass was sold by a British entrepreneur, Shammi Shinh, who hopes the publicity surrounding the deal will boost the NFT market, which is in a delicate spot: according to CoinMarketCap, the benchmark price of a Bored Ape Yacht Club token, considered the "pearl in the crown" for the Ape collection, has fallen to 93 ethereum, or about $99,501, from an all-time high of 153 eth, or $163,000, what it was worth in May.
In a statement to the Wall Street Journal – the publication that first reported the outcome of the auction – immediately after the acquisition, Giovanni Buono confessed that he and his brother have no plans to open the bottle, seeing the acquisition as a promising investment.
