Over 100 Uncorked Champagne Bottles Found in 170-Year-Old Shipwreck

A squad of marine archaeologists has serendipitously recovered a singular entity connected the Baltic seabed: a 19th-century wreck of a sailing vessel that contains implicit 100 bottles of champagne and mineral water, galore of which are inactive unopened.

According to a release from Baltictech, the diving institution that made the find, the wreck rests respective twelve miles southbound of Sweden.

“We were conscionable checking retired caller spots, which I had been collecting for years, retired of axenic curiosity, and that’s erstwhile we came crossed this wreck,” Tomasz Stachura, the person of the dive team, told CNN. “We did not expect it to beryllium thing important and adjacent hesitated for a infinitesimal whether to dive astatine all.”

The clay bottles of mineral h2o are successful baskets, well-preserved and accessible to the dive team. Mineral h2o was a invaluable point successful its time and transports of the worldly would’ve been escorted by police, according to Baltictech.

Bottles connected bottles. Photo: Tomasz Stachura / Marek Cacaj

The mineral water, branded by the institution Selters, comes from a German municipality of the aforesaid sanction wherever mineral h2o has been bottled for implicit 800 years, according to CNN. Members of the dive squad said galore of the champagne and h2o bottles were inactive sealed.

Based connected a stamp connected the bottles, the squad was capable to place the transport aboard the vas to betwixt 1850 and 1867, dating the timing of the wreck with immoderate precision.

Stachura is nary alien to the shipwrecks of the Baltic Sea. In 2020, helium was portion of a squad that explored the Nazi-era steamship Karlsruhe, the archetypal clip the wreck had been seen by quality eyes successful 75 years.

Subsequent investigations of Karlsruhe successful 2021 identified china, vehicles, and wartime cargo. Confusingly, 2 wrecks named Karlsruhe were recovered successful 2021; 1 was the steamer investigated by the Baltictech team, portion the different was a Nazi warship that sunk disconnected the seashore of Norway successful 1940.

The squad plans to revisited the recently discovered wreck adjacent year, erstwhile they anticipation to beryllium much prepared to analyse the wreck.