Champagne From Shipwreck Goes Up For Auction

By: Bill Waters - Staff Writer
Published: Apr 27, 2021

Two bottles, filled with champagne, were found from a 19th century shipwreck. In fact, the champagne is more than 200 years old. They are part of a cache of 150 salvaged from the Baltic Sea.

The cache, which belongs to the government of Aland, an archipelago in the Baltic, includes a bottle from the house of Veuve Clicquot and another from Juglar, which closed its doors in the early 19th century.

Acker Merrall & Condit, of New York, will auction the two bottles on June 3.

When the first bottle was recovered from the sunken two-masted schooner dating from about 1780-1830, Swedish champagne writer Richard Juhlin estimated it would fetch about 500,000 Swedish krona ($82,000).

“We didn’t know if it was going to be anything drinkable,” Ella Grussner Cromwell-Morgan, a sommelier who lives on Aland, said in a telephone interview about the first bottle.

Wine experts estimated from the corks and the hand-blown bottles that the wines were produced between 1811 and 1831.

“Most likely they’re older than that, because in those days they kept wine stored for 10-12 years in barrels before they shipped it,” said Christian Erikson, the diver who discovered the cache.

Erikson, a friend of Cromwell-Morgan, brought the first bottle to her.

“It tasted sweet, but it had that really crisp acidity that made it so balanced,” she said about the bottle from Juglar. “And, of course, it had all those secondary flavors — the leather, the tobacco, the dried fruits — that are associated with older wines. And there was the definite impression of oak.”

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