PARIS—Painstakingly picking vintages and varietals from vineyards throughout France for nearly three decades, David Ridgway has built La Tour d’Argent’s subterranean stone cellar into as much of a legend as the fabled 427-year-old Parisian restaurant itself.

Now, 18,000 bottles of those hand-selected wines and spirits aged exclusively in the cellar will be sold in Paris on Dec. 7–8 by French auctioneer PIASA, as Ridgway, the head sommelier, seeks to pare down the massive collection from 450,000 bottles to about 400,000 to better suit the restaurant’s changing needs and further diversify the selection by adding new winemakers and vintages. Historic vintages on the block include a bottle of 1810 Grande Fine Champagne (Renault) valued at €1,200 to €1,400 ($1,800 to $2,000) and a bottle of 1870 Château Gruaud Larose (St. Julien) valued at €900 to €1,000.

Most of the proceeds from the wine sale will go to rebuilding the cellar, though La Tour d’Argent owner André Terrail and PIASA will donate the price achieved for a bottle of Vieux Cognac Le Clos Griffier from 1788, valued at €2,500 to €3,000, to the Association Petits Princes, a Paris-based charity which aims to make the dreams of children with severe illnesses come true.

For more than four centuries, the eatery known for such delicacies as the signature pressed duck (formerly called Canard au Sangs, which roughly translates to "bloody duck") has been host to a myriad celebrities and chiefs of state, including King Henry IV of France, Winston Churchill, Marilyn Monroe, and U.S. presidents Kennedy, Nixon, and Clinton.

Terrail told ARTINFO that he had hoped to host President Obama on a recent evening, but was willing to welcome billionaire Bill Gates that same night, joking that “I guess he was our consolation prize.”

La Tour d’Argent is a nearly nightly setting for wedding proposals and other special occasions, like a recent dinner to fete a woman’s triumph over a cancer, said Terrail. Those without the deep pockets of the rich and famous scrimp and save to treat themselves to dinner there, he said.

Terrail, who took over as president in 2006 when his father Claude died and seems unlikely to be starstruck, is most amused by a story he calls the “small coins.”

“We had a group of gentlemen come in with a huge sports bag. They put it under the table, and nobody noticed until after the check,” he said. “When we asked how are they are going to pay, they [revealed] the bag, and said: ‘We fill this bag with small coins, and once it’s full we go for lunch at La Tour d’Argent.’”

As unique as every guest and every anecdote is every wine, which is only served by the bottle. Ridgway shuns the proliferating practice of serving wine by the glass, saying, “You cannot guarantee to the customer that a wine is as good as when it is served from a new bottle.”

“At such a restaurant, to be presented a bottle that is just your own, it is an art, a ceremony,” the sommelier said. “A table is reunion. It is part of the atmosphere. It is a moment together. Even if people are having different dishes, there is a communion.”

Ridgway, regarded by the Terrail family as the “auteur” of La Tour d’Argent’s wine cave, has strong ideas about not just the serving of wine, but its aging as well.

“We want the wines to reach not their peak, but their plateaus. It’s very important work for the wine cellar: aging the wines, making sure they are ready,” he said. “Some don’t have a price and are just labeled ‘TA,’ which means it is the last bottle of the stock, the most prestigious, and we are not selling it. The last bottle should be kept for history.”

The current cellar of 450,000 bottles includes about 15,000 different wines, and the auction, offering a glimpse into the restaurant’s storied past, is “a one-off situation” brought on by necessity, said Ridgway. The restaurant has scaled back its hours, closing Sundays and for six weeks per year. “In France it is considered bad form to work more than 35 hours a week,” he explained.