Why Michel Chasseuil's wine cellar will stay bottled up in a museum

Michel Chasseuil, who lives like a monk and drives an old Renault 4 car, has more than 20,000 rare bottles in a wine collection that is envied by connoisseurs

Michel Chasseuil drives an old car, never takes a holiday and lives like a monk ¡ª and yet he is the owner of a wine collection to make billionaires pale with envy.

More than 20,000 rare bottles from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries are stashed behind electronic security alarms, heavy locks and reinforced metal doors in cellars near his home in La Chapelle-Bâton, a small village in west France. But few, if any, are destined to be drunk.

Instead, Mr Chasseuil wants to put the collection ¡ª described by some connoisseurs as the greatest in the world ¡ª into a wine museum that he hopes to set up in the Bordeaux region of southwest France.

¡°However many millions I'm offered, I'm not going to sell it,¡± he told The Times. ¡°If I did that it would all be consumed by les nouveaux riches within a decade.¡±

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The thought appals Mr Chasseuil, 67, who describes wine as a ¡°passion which turned into a religion¡±.

He began his collection with the help of his grandfather, a cattle merchant, who returned home from his travels with cows to fatten and wine to sip.

Mr Chasseuil became an aeronautical engineer and spent much of his pay ¡ª and all his end-of-year bonuses ¡ª on what was soon more than a pastime. He went to auctions and vineyards, first in France and then in other European countries, the US, Australia and South Africa, in search of rare bottles.

¡°No one was really interested in wine auctions in those days and I could pick up bottles quite cheaply,¡± he said.

Mr Chasseuil always acquired two cases of the wines he wanted ¡ª one to keep and one to drink. But when their value exploded in the 1990s as the self-made rich came to see wine as a symbol of their newfound status, he started to sell the second cases ¡ª often at a healthy profit. A case of 1982 Petrus ¡ª the bordeaux described as the king of wines ¡ª which he had bought for 300 francs a bottle (about £30) sold for $50,000 (£33,000). The value of an 1847 Château d'Yquem, the hallowed white bordeaux, rose from about £1,000 to about £35,000 in a couple of decades.

Mr Chasseuil acquired the funds to extend his collection.

He bought every 20th-century vintage of Château d'Yquem, including empty bottles from the years when the Lur Saluces family, which owned the vineyard, deemed the grapes to be unfit. Mr Chasseuil also has every vintage of Roman¨¦e-Conti, the prestigious burgundy, since 1905 and every Petrus from 1924.

His rare bottles include an 1811 Château d'Yquem ¡ª valued at €35,000 (£29,000) ¡ª a 1735 Hunt's port and an 1811 Maison de l'Empereur champagne produced for Napoleon. The latter two are priceless since their value could be set only at an auction, which Mr Chasseuil rules out.

¡°I never took holidays and I never really spent my money on anything except for my wine,¡± he said. ¡°I live like a monk and my car is a Renault 4L which has 200,000 kilometres on the clock.¡±

For years, he kept his collection hidden from the wine establishment. When he revealed it, connoisseurs were stunned. Marcel Guigal, a producer in Burgundy, said that it was the greatest private collection in the world.

Now Mr Chasseuil is looking for funding to pay for the museum that he wants to set up in Saint-Émilion, near Bordeaux. ¡°I'm not a rich man,¡± he said. ¡°And I need someone to help me with this project.¡±

He said that the institution would promote his philosophy that ¡°life's not worth living without pleasure, and pleasure is a glass of wine with each meal¡±.