Divers found 170-year-old champagne on the Baltic seafloor — still drinkable, worth €100,000 a bottle, and it convinced Veuve Clicquot to age wine undersea.
On June 16, 2010, scuba divers exploring a wreck off Finland's Åland Islands found something no one expected: 168 intact bottles of champagne resting in the hull of a schooner that sank around 1840. The wine had been sitting on the Baltic seafloor, untouched, for 170 years.
There were no labels left after nearly two centuries underwater, but researchers identified the producers from brand marks stamped into the corks. Forty-seven of the bottles came from Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, the storied champagne house founded in 1772 and still operating today.
The Baltic turned out to be an accidental perfect wine cellar. A constant temperature of about 4°C, total darkness, unusually low salinity, and steady pressure preserved the champagne so well that its acetic acid levels showed almost no spoilage after 170 years.
In 2015, a team led by Professor Philippe Jeandet of the University of Reims published a chemical analysis of the wine in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It was a time capsule of 19th-century winemaking: lower alcohol from a colder climate and weaker yeasts, plus traces of iron, copper, and salt from wooden vats, copper sulfate vine treatments, and old stabilization methods.
The most startling number was the sugar: at least 140 grams per liter, compared to the 6 to 8 grams in a typical modern brut. That sweetness was a clue to the cargo's destination — it matched the taste of the Germanic Confederation's market, not Russia's, where drinkers demanded a syrupy 300 grams per liter.
Tasters' first impressions were not flattering: 'animal notes,' 'wet hair,' and 'cheesy.' But after the wine got some air, it transformed into something grilled, spicy, smoky, and leathery with fruity and floral notes. Jeandet said the aroma stayed in his mouth for three or four hours after a taste.
The recovered bottles became some of the most expensive champagne ever sold, with several fetching up to €100,000 each at auction. Others were donated to museums and historical institutions rather than drunk.
The discovery inspired Veuve Clicquot to launch 'Cellar in the Sea' in 2014, deliberately sinking a vault of its champagne 40 meters down in the same Åland waters for a planned 40-year aging experiment. Cellar masters periodically compare the sea-aged bottles against identical twins resting in the house's chalk cellars in Reims — and early tastings show the ocean really does change the wine.