The price of alcohol is always a contentious matter. Governments want to pile on the tax to raise revenue, campaigners want a hike in prices to dissuade over-drinking, snobbish connoisseurs want to keep prices up to maintain an elitism that is actually long gone. On the other side you have the ordinary citizen who wants to bring the prices down so that he can enjoy the odd glass with a meal.

But if you want to pay over the odds you have plenty of opportunity. The following are some of the extravagances committed over the years by people with more money than sense.

• In 2008 a bidder at a charity auction parted with $80,000 for each of 6 magnums of 1992 Screaming Eagle coming to the grand total of $480,000
• In 1997 a 1945 Jeroboam of Chateau Mouton-Rothschild sold for $114,614 at auction in Christie’s
• In 1985 a 1787 bottle of Chateau Lafitte went for $160,000. The high price tag reflected the “fact” that the bottle came from the private cellar US President Thomas Jefferson, something the buyer later disproved, probably feeling just a little bit silly for having been taken in.
• Then in 1997 divers discovered 200 bottles of 1907 Heidsieck, Champagne that was on route to the Russian Imperial family. The boat they were being transported in sank off Finland in 1916, just in time to miss the revolution, and there they remained chilling till their discovery when they began to fetch $275,000 a shout.

And as of this week we can add a very old Cognac to the list of over-priced plonk. A 1788, yes 1788, bottle of Cognac was sold in Paris for €25,000, the proceeds going to charity. The bottle, and a few others of its kind, had been long kept in the cellar of top restaurant La Tour d’Argent on the left bank of the Seine. But who would drink a bottle of anything that started life a year before the official beginning of the French Revolution?