Treasure trove of champers retrieved

FRANCE: Pol Roger, the French champagne house whose wine was famous for being former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s favourite tipple, has unearthed a treasure trove of bottles lost in collapsed cellars for more than a century.

Experts say the 26 bottles so far recovered could still be drinkable, and there may well be many more from the million or so lost at the time.

The fate of the bottles had been the stuff of ‘‘dreams and nightmares for generations of the family and cellar masters’’, said Laurent d’Harcourt, Pol Roger’s chief executive.

The story began on February

23, 1900, when two floors of cellars collapsed. Nobody was hurt but the loss was devastating, as about

1.5 million bottles and 500 casks had been buried.

The Roger brothers considered tunnelling to retrieve the wine. But when a neighbour’s cellar collapsed, they decided it was too risky and built new cellars.

Previous salvage bids came to naught. However, more than a century later, a project to build a packaging facility on the site of the historic cellars gave the fifth generation of the family another crack at locating them. On January 15, construction workers digging underground found a ‘‘void’’.

Encrusted in chalky soil, the hand-blown bottles are in good condition. Records suggest the vintages are between the years

1887 and 1898. Many would have been destined for Britain, Pol Roger’s prime market then as now.

A fair few may well have ended up drunk by Churchill, who ordered his first Pol Roger, a 1895 vintage, in 1908, and, it has been claimed, drunk 42,000 bottles in his lifetime.