The World’s oldest Champagne has 
been found on the Baltic seabed near the Aland Islands, between Sweden and Finland. Whilst divers were exploring a ship wreck in the Baltic sea they came across 30 bottles of champagne thought to pre-date the French Revolution. Diving instructor Christian Ekstrom found the Champagne and retrieved one bottle from a depth of 200 feet. The bottle – whose shape indicates it was produced in the 18th Century – has now been sent to France for analysis. If confirmed, it would be the oldest drinkable champagne in the world. The wine found on the seabed was perfectly preserved because of the conditions of dark and cold on the seabed and they are 98% certain it is Veuve Clicquot. 
It’s thought to possibly be part of a consignment sent by King Louis XVI to the Czar of the Russian Imperial Court. Veuve Clicquot has a record of a delivery that never reached its destination, and this wreckage found could possibly be that lost shipment. It’s estimated by experts that if this is the wine made between 1782 and 1788, each bottle would get about $69,000 at auction.
Ekstrom said the divers were overjoyed when they popped the cork on their boat after hauling the bubbly aboard. He said:
“It tasted fant
astic. It was a very sweet champagne, with a tobacco taste and oak.”
One of the experts contacted by Ekstrom and his team, Swedish wine expert Carl-Jan Granqvist said:
“If this is true, it is totally unique . . . I don’t know of any other (drinkable) bottle this old. I’ve never even heard of it. . . . If it’s the right atmosphere outside, and inside the bottle the cork is kept dry in the middle; it keeps itself.”
A local wine expert, Ella Gruessner Cromwell-Morgan, who was also asked to test one of the bottles by the diving team said it tasted “absolutely fabulous” – although sweet by modern standards – a
nd had lost none of its fizz. “I still have a glass in my fridge and keep going back every five minutes to take a breath of it. I have to pinch myself to believe it’s real.” She said the champagne was dark golden in colour and smelled of tobacco, but also grape and white fruits, oak and mead. “It is really surprising, very sweet but still with some acidity.”
Because the wreck lies off Aland, an autonomous part of Finland, the local authorities will decide what will be done with the wreck – and the Champagne.
According to records, production of Clicquot Champagne began in 1772, but was disrupted after the French Revolution in 1789. If the bottles were indeed produced in the 1780s, the champagne would be approximately 4 decades older than the current record-holder for oldest bottle of Champagne – a bottle of Perrier-Jouët from 1825.
Perrier-Jouët produced the bottle in 1825, when George IV was on the British throne and it was opened along with 19 other Perrier-Jouët vintages — four from the 19th century, fourteen from the 20th and one from the 21st — at a ceremony to which the Champagne House had invited 12 experts to sample what it called “liquid history”in 2009.
Perrier-Jouët said that it had laid on la dégustation to announce its latest vintage, from 2002, with a demonstration that good Champagne can be kept for decades in the right conditions.
Michel Bettane, France’s most celebrated wine critic, said the tasting this month was an experience he would not forget. “It’s the sort of thing which happens once in a lifetime,” he told The Times. “The 1825 was a very interesting wine. There were flavours of mushrooms, woods and a bit of honey.”
The oldest wines had been stored in the same spot in Perrier-Jouët’s cellars, 70ft underground at a constant temperature of 11C (52F). Perrier-Jouët has two more 1825 bottles in the cellar . . . and they are not opening them in the near future.
