Is the 19th-century champagne resting at the bottom of the Baltic Sea still drinkable? A team of Polish divers has uncovered the wreckage of an old sailing ship laden with luxury goods, including porcelain items and approximately 100 bottles of champagne and mineral water, at a depth of about 58 meters (190 feet) off the coast of Sweden.
According to Tomasz Stachura, the leader of the team, these valuable items were likely destined for the royal table in Stockholm or the Russian tsar’s residence in St. Petersburg when the ship sank in the latter half of the 19th century.
The private diving group Baltictech, which specializes in exploring shipwrecks on the Baltic seabed, made the discovery on July 11 while investigating areas of interest roughly 37 kilometers (20 nautical miles) south of the isle of Öland. Although they were about to conclude their day, two divers, Marek Cacaj and Pawel Truszynski, decided to make a quick dive and returned two hours later with news of the wreckage and its valuable cargo.
“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,” Stachura told The Associated Press this week.
The stoneware bottles were imprinted with the brand of mineral water, Selters, which was believed to have medicinal properties at the time. The champagne brand remains undetermined, but a letter R could be seen on one cork, according to Stachura.
He believes the contents of the bottles are still in good condition. “At this depth, the wreckage is perfectly preserved, the temperature is constant, there are no currents, and it’s dark,” Stachura explained. “That preserves the wreckage in a wonderful way.”
Stachura mentioned that experts in champagne and Selters have already contacted Baltictech and are interested in conducting laboratory tests on the bottles’ contents. However, it is up to Swedish authorities to decide the next steps in exploring the wreck.
Previously, divers from Baltictech discovered the wreck of the SS Karlsruhe, the last ship to leave Koenigsberg in 1945 during the evacuation of German civilians in World War II.