Thousands of bottles of vintage wine amassed by Jacques Chirac during his lavish two-decade reign as Mayor of Paris are to be auctioned off from the town hall's vast cellar, reports The Telegraph of London.

The majority of the cellar's 5,000 most prestigious bottles, including several 1990 Château Pétrus, worth more than £1,000 each, are due to be sold in the autumn.

A bottle of its grand crus would sell for about £300 in restaurants. In all, the current Socialist Mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, expects the sale, which includes 191 bottles of 1976 Krug champagne, to raise around £350,000.

Until now, the whereabouts and contents of the wine cellar, situated deep in the bowels of the Hôtel de Ville, the town hall, had been a well-kept secret.

Last year, a team of government auditors indexed the collection and said that housing such expensive wine was a liability considering the "very high price of certain bottles," and the risk that bottles could be damaged if the nearby Seine burst its banks.

The auditors noted that the amount of wine drunk at town hall receptions in 2004 had dropped to just over 15,000 bottles -- half the level it was at the end of the Chirac era, despite an equal number of receptions.

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