No ‘pagne, no gain.
A team of Polish divers discovered the wreckage of a 19th-century sailing ship with hundreds of still-sealed bottles of champagne that nearly rival the oldest in the world.
Divers from the private group Baltictech — which searches for shipwrecks on the Baltic seabed — nearly missed out on the trove of bubbly.
They were returning from another dive July 11 and nearly dismissed what appeared to be a sunken fishing boat 190 feet below the surface off the Swedish coast, they said in a release.
Two determined divers decided to give the wreck a quick gander, but vanished for almost two hours — leading the team to believe they found “something very interesting on the bottom.”
The wreck was filled “to the brim” with luxury items, including 100 bottles of champagne, porcelain and mineral water, the latter of which was once believed to have medicinal properties and were only available to royals.
The brand of mineral water, Selters, was imprinted on the stoneware bottles — and shockingly is still in existence today.
The Champagne brand is still to be determined, but the letter R could be seen on one cork.
“I have been diving for 40 years, and it often happens that we find a bottle or two in a wreck, but to discover so much cargo, it’s a first for me,” Tomasz Stachura, the team’s leader, told The Associated Press this week.
They believe the precious goods could have been on the way to the royal table in Stockholm or the Russian tsar’s residence in St. Petersburg when the ship sank sometime in the second half of the 19th century, according to the leader of the team, Stachura said.
Based on the shape of the stamp on the shipment boxes, historians believe the champagne was produced between 1850 and 1867.
That would make it just a few years younger than the oldest bottle of champagne, Perrier-Jouet’s 1825 Vintage, in existence.
Whether the newly discovered champagne is worthy of a toast is yet to be determined, but Stachura is confident the trove is in good condition.
“At this depth the wreckage is perfectly preserved, the temperature is constant, there are no currents and it’s dark,” Stachura said.
“That preserves the wreckage in a wonderful way.”
