Austerity hits French President’s wine cellar at Elysee Palace

As Europe continues in the grip of recession, the latest notable casualty of austerity measures is President Francois Hollande's wine cellar.

The Élysée Palace, the president's official residence, announced this week that the Paris auction house Kapandji Morhange would auction off 1,200 bottles of its finest wines. These would be replaced with ''more modest'' vintages.

The money raised - expected to be around €250,000 - will be used to buy cheaper wines; the surplus will be funded into the country's budget.

The bottles in upcoming sale make up about 10 per cent of the 12,000 bottles in the Élysée Palace's famous cellar, which provides wines for state functions. Drouot says some of the wines, mostly from Bordeaux and Burgundy, have ''accompanied great moments of the Fifth Republic,'' and the cellar's wines have been served to numerous foreign guests.

While the Financial Times says one of the bottles up for sale, a 1990 Petrus Bordeaux, is worth about €2,200, the auction house says most bottles should be available for less than €100.

Since he took office in 2012, France's Socialist President François Hollande has tried to portray himself as ''Mr Normal,'' a man who prefers people to money and rejects the excesses associated with his predecessors in the post. So the wine auction may be a symbolic gesture to show empathy with a nation feeling the pinch of austerity.

The plan also comes after the city of Dijon auctioned 3,500 bottles in January, as socialist Mayor François Rebsamen sold half of the city's official cellar, raising €150,000 to help fund the city's struggling social services.

Across the Channel, the British government also auctioned off vintage French wine from its cellars last month as part of an austerity drive, according to Reuters.

The last Socialist president, François Mitterrand, was well known for his love of Burgundy and for a St.-Estèphe, Haut-Marbuzet.

Georges Pompidou was said to love Chasse-Spleen, while Valéry Giscard d'Estaing favoured fine Bordeaux from the Médoc. Jacques Chirac, who had high tastes in art and wine, and a fondness for Dom Pérignon, preferred to be seen in public drinking beer.

Given the size of the deficit, this auction represents just drops in the bucket - albeit highly exclusive drops.

Among the wines to be auctioned at the end of the month at the Hôtel Drouot are three bottles of 1990 Château Petrus, estimated to be worth $3,000 to $3,400 a bottle, and a 1998 Meursault Premier Cru, a fine white burgundy.

There will also be bottles of 1975 Château Lafite Rothschild, estimated at more than $1,000 each, and 1985 Krug Champagne, as well as Champagne from Salon, some of the world's rarest and most expensive.

In general, the best bottles are served to heads of state and monarchs. When President George W Bush made his last visit to France in 2008, former President Nicolas Sarkozy, who like Bush does not drink alcohol, served Château Mouton Rothschild to his guests.

The chief sommelier of the Élysée, Virginie Routis, who was appointed in 2007, selected the bottles to be sold. They make up just a tenth of the presidential cellars, which were established in 1947. Lesser bottles will be sold, too, with some expected to start at as little as $20 and many available for less austere prices of under $130.

The wines on sale will be almost exclusively French, as the cellars of the Élysée allow no foreigners.

But French rieslings from Alsace, now on the German side of the border, will be on sale.