World's rarest liquors being sold for £5m by Dutch collector

It is the most valuable and fascinating drinks cabinet in the world. In a locked and chilled store room in what was once a cowshed, Bay van der Bunt pulls a dusty bottle from the very end of a wooden shelf filled with similarly dusty bottles. He pours the merest sliver of clear dark-amber liquid into a glass.

"That's about seven sips. Don't drink it. Don't swallow. Take a tiny sip and leave it in your mouth," he instructs.

The 203-year-old brandy tastes smooth and warm and hard not to swallow. But a bottle 50 years younger than this sold for €119,162 (£100,000) at auction last year, so it seems only right to savour every sip, especially if each one is worth around €260. "That's probably the oldest brandy you'll every taste," says Van der Bunt, tactfully omitting "and the most expensive".

Some people have walk-in wardrobes; Van der Bunt, 63, has a walk-in drinks cupboard, filled with some 5,000 bottles of old spirits and liqueurs: cognac, armagnac, port, chartreuse. It has taken the Dutchman nearly 40 years to build up what is believed to be the largest such private collection in the world, and now he is selling it lock, stock and dusty bottle for €6m (£5m) or near offer.

Following Van der Bunt around the shelves is like a march through history. He darts around, moving a 1796 Napoleon cognac (€26,000) a millimetre to the left and a 1789 Courvoisier & Curlier (€49,000) a millimetre to the right or shuffling early-19th-century bottles of AE Dor cognac, as if for the simple pleasure of touching them.

"Look," he says excitedly. "This one is from 1789, the year of the French revolution. Imagine that. They were storming the Bastille when that one was made."

"And that one there," he gestures to a hand-blown six-litre jeroboam marked 1795 Brugerolle and topped with creamy dripping wax, worth an estimated €138,000 at the back of a high shelf, "that's the last of its kind in the world. It travelled with Napoleon's army. You can just see it there lying with the others in the hay cart. After the battle – and probably before – the officers would drink from it. Come here so you can have a better look."

On another shelf, the Dutchman points out an unremarkable, unlabelled cognac bottle. "Now that one, that one came from the Duke of Windsor's cellar in Paris," he raptures.

The dust is a vital part of history. "Clean them? Oh, no, you never, never dust them," he says. "Some of these bottles have been in different cellars. The dust is a record of their history."

In his dapper grey suit and braces, Van der Bunt looks to the manor born in this beautifully converted farmhouse just outside the southern Dutch city of Breda. In fact, he admits with some pride, he is a self-made man. His grandfather and father, both garden labourers who liked to collect and drink cognac, inspired what started as a hobby and ended as something of an obsession.

"They were hard workers and hard drinkers. Not drunks, drinkers, and they did like their cognac. My father was more interested in what was in the bottle than the bottle itself. When I look back at the fine cognac he drank, I reckon he must have got through four or five Rolls-Royces' worth."

But Van der Bunt says his father was not impressed by his son's first acquisitions.

"I was 23, working as a car salesman, and bought two bottles of cognac for the equivalent of a day's wages each. He said I was stupid, I'd paid too much and I didn't know what I was doing. Actually, he was right."

The Dutchman next became a dealer in French antiques. As a sideline, he would snap up bottles of cognac from house clearances in France to add to those his father and grandfather left him. "In those days, people wanted the wine from cellars, but not old liqueurs. It started as a hobby, but then became an investment, then a collection," he says.

He hopes to sell the collection as a whole to another collector, probably Russian or Chinese "new rich", but has no idea what he will do with the money. He has bought a caravan and says he and his wife Ria, 65, will probably potter around Spain "like Gypsies".

"It's not about the money. The process of selling them is exciting, but I will be very sad to see them go. I will be here looking at the empty shelves with tears in my eyes."

Asked how he feels about a buyer drinking one of his historic cognacs, he looks pained. "I fear people will drink them," he says. "This will be more than a pity. It will be barbaric. Just barbaric."

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