The bottle of Gautier 1762 cognac must no longer be a strange face in the spirits collectors’s world, this famous version has consumed a lot of ink from the media, with more than 1000 famous articles from more than 200 countries around the world written about it.
This “extremely rare” bottle of Cognac has been stored since the late 19th century, before the French revolution, from the Alphonse family, in different sizes, Grand Frère (‘eldest brother’), Petit Frere (‘second brother’) and Petit Soeur, (‘youngest’).
In 2014, The Petit Frere bottle is recognized by Guinness as the world’s oldest bottle of cognac. At the same time, the Petit Frere bottle was sold at an auction in Bonham, New York to a Warsaw-based company Wealth Solutions. In 2015, the Petit Frere bottle was used as a cognac watch, celebrating the collaboration between Wealth Solutions and Swiss watchmaker Armin Strom.
I thought this would be the end of the legendary 1762 bottles, the oldest bottle of cognac. Surprisingly, after 5 years since the one was used as a cognac watch in 2015, in 2020, the bottle of ‘big brother’ Grand Frère proudly reappeared in an auction at Sotheby’s London and brought himself two noble Guinness World Records recognized by the Guinness World Organization.
So where is the ‘youngest’ Petit Soeur? According to the media, the Petit Soeur bottle is proudly displayed in the cognac museum Maison Gautier in southwestern France, which is guarded by a royal order, signed by King Louis XV in 1755, but no one has ever seen it so far.
It seems that there’s no other miracle here, and perhaps the wine connoisseurs will not see any more versions, now a surprise reunion between the eldest brother “Grand Frère” and the youngest brother “Petit Soeur”. A reunion that never seemed possible, yet it happened in real life. Currently, the youngest bottle “Petit Soeur” 1762 is available in Vietnam.