This Rare Item From Princess Diana and Prince Charles’s 1981 Wedding Could Sell for a Staggering $95,000

There were around 3,500 guests at the July 29, 1981 wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer at St. Paul’s Cathedral, and another 750 million people watched from their television screens worldwide. Now, over 44 years after the fact, interested parties can still take home a souvenir from the occasion—but it’ll cost you a cool $95,000.

According to Vanity Fair, the former Prince and Princess of Wales’s wedding champagne is up for auction, a magnum of Dom Pérignon Vintage 1961 that was served on their wedding day (with 1961 marking the year of Diana’s birth—she had just turned 20 years old when she walked down the aisle). The bottle is only one of 12 in existence and is expected to net up to $95,000.

The auction is happening on December 11 and is put on by Bruun Rasmussen at Kongens Lyngby, a Danish auction house on the outskirts of Copenhagen, according to Vanity Fair. It is labeled, appropriately, “Shipped specially in honor of the wedding of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer, July 29, 1981.”

“There are only 12 magnums available, and this is one of them,” Bruun Rasmussen’s wine manager Thomas Rosendahl Andersen told AFP. “It’s perfectly drinkable.”

“All the bottles of wine we sell at auction are examined and analyzed,” he continued. “For this type of bottle, we carry out several tests, including illuminating the bottle to check that the contents, i.e. the wine itself, has a very nice, clear color, and that it’s not brown and cloudy.”

As for who might bid on the bottle, “It could be a classic wine collector who finds it amusing to have this bottle in his collection, but also a collector of royal objects, who collects items perhaps related to Lady Diana or English royal memorabilia,” Andersen added.

The bottle’s potential $95,000 price tag is far higher than a slice of cake from the wedding that sold for over $3,000 in July 2021, at what would have been Charles and Diana’s 40th anniversary. The bottle is being sold by an anonymous collector who bought the magnum from a London dealer, AFP reported.

Despite Charles and Diana’s wedding being called “the stuff of which fairytales are made” by Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie as he married them, Diana had numerous trepidations about marrying Charles ahead of the ceremony, including confessing her fears to her sisters and her father. She sadly later described her wedding day as the “worst day of my life” and said she felt like “a lamb to the slaughter” as she walked down the aisle.

Yet, at such a tender age, Diana was young enough to still be hopeful that it could all work out as soon as she and Charles said “I do.” She told her biographer Andrew Morton that, on their wedding day, “I remember being so in love with my husband that I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I just absolutely thought I was the luckiest girl in the world. He was going to look after me.”