WARSAW – Is the 19th century Champagne on the bottom of the Baltic Sea still fit for a toast?
A team of Polish divers has discovered the wreckage of an old sailing ship loaded “to the brim” with luxury goods including porcelain items and about 100 bottles of Champagne and mineral water about 58 meters (190 feet) deep off the Swedish coast.
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They believe the precious goods could have been on the way to the royal table in Stockholm or the Russian tsar's residence in St. Petersburg when the ship sank sometime in the second half of the 19th century, according to the leader of the team, Tomasz Stachura.
The private Baltictech group of divers which searches for shipwrecks on the Baltic seabed made the discovery on July 11 while checking spots of interest about 37 kilometers (20 nautical miles) south of the isle of Öland. They were ready to call it a day, but two divers, Marek Cacaj and Pawel Truszynski, decided to make a quick dive and emerged two hours later with the 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 brand of mineral water, Selters, believed at the time to have medical properties, was imprinted on the stoneware bottles. The Champagne brand is still to be determined., but the letter R could be seen on one cork, Stachura said.
He said he believes the contents 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 said. "That preserves the wreckage in a wonderful way.”
He said Champagne and Selters experts have already contacted Baltictech and are interested in doing laboratory tests on the contents of the bottles. But it is Swedish authorities who will decide the next steps in exploring the wreck, Stachura said.
Divers from Baltictech previously discovered the wreck of the SS Karlsruhe, the last ship to leave Koenigsberg in 1945 as part of the evacuation of German civilians in World War II.