Never mind getting in the bubbly for this New Year's Eve - French champagne producers are already running out of superlatives to describe their millennium vintages - and anyone keen to part with up to £1,000 for a bottle of the finest festive fizz for December 31st, 1999, had better get moving.
"Orders are coming in very satisfactorily indeed, and from all over the world," said Mr JeanClaude Rouzaud of Louis Roederer, one of the region's leading producers, "but we are not really surprised. It will be a unique event and we've got something to match it - from some of the very best vines of the Champagne region. Perfection, we feel, will be guaranteed."
Roederer's centennial Cristal 2000 brew, sold exclusively on subscription, is at present maturing in 2,000 numbered methu salems - the equivalent of eight normal bottles - in a specially conditioned Cave 2000.
It costs, appropriately, £2,000 a throw and is well on the way to being sold out. "They'll be talking of this Cristal for as long as they talked about the very first Cristal vintage, which we produced for the last Tsar," Mr Rouzaud modestly predicted.
Selling equally well, and a steal at £500 a jeroboam, is Pol Roger's Winston Churchill 1988. The 1,000 numbered and certificated bottles will, said a company spokesman, be on their way to subscribers in spring 1999.
The price was fully justified, he said. "It will be 12 years old and it was a marvellous prestige vintage, just right for the new millennium - I think we can safely say it will be perfection in a bottle."
For a mere £1,000 a jeroboam, or four standard bottles, PerrierJouet is offering its Reserve Belle Epoque 1995. It comes in a gold and platinum-embossed flask and with a night in the company's luxurious Belle Epoque mansion thrown in.
Taittinger has opted to head decidedly downmarket, with a limited series of numbered magnums of a special Cuvee du Millenaire at just £60 a throw.
The industry as a whole, which went through serious problems in the early 1990s, says it expects to sell more than 300 million cases of more moderately priced bubbly in the 12 months running up to January 1st, 1999, compared with 250 million cases in a normal year.