200-Year-Old Champagne Auction; Bubbly Could Sell For $37,400 Or More

Several bottles of champagne, salvaged from a nearly 200-year-old Baltic shipwreck, will go up for auction in Finland this week and could sell for thousands of dollars.

Eleven bottles of champagne, which were found in the wreck off Finland's Aaland Islands in 2010, will go up for auction on Friday. Expectations are high after one bottle from the same batch sold for $37,400 last year.

Six bottles of Juglar, four bottles of Veuve Clicquot and one bottle of Heidsieck & Co will be auctioned off on Friday, Agence France-Presse reported. The bottles were found in the shipwreck, which dates from 1825 to 1830.

The fine bottles of champagne have conserved their taste as a result of the ideal conditions at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, champagne expert Richard Juhlin told AFP.

The champagne will be auctioned by France's Artcurial action house at the Alandica Congress and Cultural Centre in Mariehamn, Aaland Islands, at 3 p.m. local time and all proceeds will go to charities.

World's Most Expensive Camera Auctioned

It's been a fruitful season for the auctioning of vintage items.

A rare 1923 Leica camera was sold in Vienna in May for 2.16 million euros ($2.7 million), becoming the most expensive camera ever sold. In 2007, a similar Leica o-series was sold for $430,000 and last year one sold for $1.7 million.

The camera, which was bought by an anonymous buyer, is one of 25 prototypes of the Leica O-series; only half of them have been preserved and this particular specimen still works, according to the Daily Mail.

The German camera maker is one of the most reputable camera brands in the world, but even its most powerful machine, which shoots up to a 100 frames per second, doesn't come close to the value of the vintage 1923 camera.

The limited edition M9-P, which heralds 18-megapixels an aluminum finish and white leather, is selling in Japan for $31,700, according to tecca.com.

The previous world record price for a camera was £732,000 for a daguerreotype, the Daily Mail reports.