Baltic Seabed – Home To The World’s Oldest Champagne July 23, 2010 by lukesheppard

30 bottles of champagne that was thought to date back to before the French Revolution was found by divers on the Baltic seabed. They opened a bottle and found that is was still in good condition. The believed it was made between 1782 and 1788 by Clicquot (non known as Veuve Clicquot.) Because of it’s shape, the bottle indicates it was made in the 18th Century. It has now been sent to France to be analysed. If confirmed, the champagne would be the oldest, drinkable champagne in the World. A diver called Christian Ekstrom was exploring a shipwreck found on the Baltic seabed when he came across the bottles.

He surfaced with one of the bottles and opened it and tasted it with his colleagues.

He said: “It was fantastic! It had a very sweet taste, you could taste the oak and it had a very strong tobacco smell about it and it had really small bubble.” The diver who retrieved the champagne said it was an honour to drink it Clicquot champagne, according to records, was first produced in 1772 but was laid down for 10 years. Production was disrupted after the French Resolution in 1789. The wine found was perfectly reserved because of the conditions of the dark and cold seabed.  If it’s discovered that the bottles do come from the 1780s, that would make them about 40 years older than current record-holder, a bottle of Perrier-Jouet from 1825. Wine bottles have estimated that each bottle would be worth around 500,000 Swedish kronor (£45,000) at auction. It was off the coast of Aaland that the bottles were found, an autonomous part of Finland. It will be the local authorities that will decide what is done with the shipwreck and the remaining bottles of champagne.