Jewel-encrusted bottle on Australian tour

Press, 25 February 1986, Page 26

Jewel-encrusted bottle on Australian tour

NZPA-AAP Adelaide The world’s most rare and expensive champagne bottle will lob into Australia late next week.

It will be surrounded by what is thought to be the most extravagant security ever afforded a mere bottle.

But this is no ordinary bottle.

From its description, it is not unlike Dashiell Hammett’s fictional “Maltese Falcon” — a jewel-encrusted bird which in a book and a film caused greedy empire builders to go on a desperately murderous international chase. It is the Piper Rare bottle. It is encrusted with gold, jewels and precious stones, and is insured for SUSIOO,OOO ($NZ188,482). It belongs to the French Champagne House of Piper-Heidsieck in Rheims.

The French jewellers, Van Cleef and Arpels, were commissioned for an undisclosed sum to design the bottle to commemo-

rate Piper-Heidsieck’s 200th anniversary in 1982.

It was made to the original design of a bottle decorated in 1882 by the French designer, Carl Faberge, for the centenary of Piper-Heidsieck.

The bottle will arrive in Brisbane on February 27 for a two-week capital city tour in the care of Piper-Heidsieck’s export director, Gilles De Courcel.

Piper-Heidsieck champagne is sold in Australia by Thomas Hardy and Sons, winemakers in Reynella, South Australia. It is Mr De Courcel’s first visit to Australia, and he is bringing the bottle because it is the PiperHeidsieck trade mark. The bottle has a mantlet in gold net round its neck which is topped with a capsule in gold.

Round the neck are two gold rings set with brilliant small diamonds, below that is a medallion in engraved gold inlaid with leaves of lapis lazuli which are pinned with

white gold.

Letters are printed in gold in relief on a base of chased black gold to mark the label. It has 1976 vintage champagne inside, the top Piper-Heidsieck brand. The champagne would not be drunk while it was in Australia, a Hardy’s spokesman said. The new design called for replacing the usual stagniolage (which is a technique of hand working tin foil capsules) and covering the neck of the bottle with a necklet of gold net, topped with a real champagne capsule in twin gold wire.

The finished work was presented in September 1982 to the chairman of Piper-Heidsieck.

After Brisbane, Mr de Courcel and the bottle will spend four days in Sydney from March 1, then two days in Melbourne.

Mr de Courcel will then visit Adelaide and Perth before : returning to France with his precious cargo on March 14.