Many divers hope to see coral reefs, or rare aquatic animals, or even to glimpse a shipwreck, but few expect to find an elaborate wine cellar. But that’s what happened recently to a dive team in the Baltic Sea, who investigated the wreckage of a 19th Century ship and found more than 100 bottles of Champagne.
The team from Polish diving group Baltictech were exploring the wreck off the coast of Sweden when they made the discovery. They had not anticipated finding anything particularly unusual in the wreck, but they turned up a bonanza of fine wine and also some mineral water sealed in clay bottles.
“I have been diving for 40 years, and it often happens that there is one bottle or two… but to discover a wreck with so much cargo, it’s a first for me,” said the leader of the diving team, Tomasz Stachura, in a release sent to CNN.
In a description of the dive on the Baltitech website, the divers explain that it is the mineral water which is most interesting historically, as mineral water was rare at this period of history and was only found at royal tables. Working with historians, they have narrowed down the date of the shipment to the period between 1850 and 1867.
The divers informed the authorities about what they had found, and they won’t be bringing the Champagne to the surface any time soon as the extraction of the bottles will require careful preparation. Underwater wine aging has become a trend since some Champagne was found on previous wrecks in good condition, so perhaps one day the divers or expert historians will be able to sample this taste of history.
