Amazing Champagne Story: Mercier Blending Barrel

I'm doing a deep dive (for me) about Champagne and wanted to follow up the post Champagne Part 1: Location with something about the geology of Champagne but I got side tracked by rereading Champagne by Don and Petie Kladstrup. The paragraph on page 120 caught my eye:
     Mercier, who founded his own champagne house when he was only twenty, was a man of boundless energy ("I sleep fast," he explained) and unlimited creativity. He caused a stir at the 1889 Exposition when he arrived with a team of twenty-four white oxen hauling the world's largest wine barrel, a cask what took sixteen years to build and contained an equivalent of two hundred thousand bottles of champagne. The barrel was so huge that roads had to be widened and houses had to be bought up and demolished in order to get it from Épernay to Paris. ¹
If the above description is unfathomable and defies imagination, when I went to Google "Mercier Champagne Barrel 1889 Exposition" I came upon this link: Grandes Marques & Maisons de Champagne and on that site, they had this:

I also learned that the barrel was not necessarily constructed for the 1889 Exposition but was made because Eugène Mercier needed a container big enough to allow blending on a grand scale so that he could provide his clients with wines of a consistent character year after year. There is more amazing information on the Grandes Marques & Maisons de Champagne and I urge you to read the extraordinary steps Mercier took to get his barrel to the 1889 Exposition in Paris. It is truly jaw dropping!
The question is, did this amazing barrel survive? The answer is "yes" and it is on exhibit at Champagne Mercier in Epernay.

I am filing this story on my Esoteria Tab with the other amazing wine relics such as:

• The Vix Krater
• The Heidelberg Tun

References:
1. Don and Petie Kladstrup, "Champagne How the World's Most Glamorous Wine Triumphed Over War and Hard Times", HarperCollins Publishers, 2005, page 102.
2. Grandes Marques & Maisons de Champagne.