Tastiest time capsule: underwater champagne

AFP reports the discovery of the world's oldest champagne in a shipwreck 55 meters deep off of the Finnish island of Aaland.

Thought to be premium brand Veuve Clicquot, the 30 bottles discovered perfectly preserved at a depth of 55 metres (180 feet) could have been in a consignment sent by France's King Louis XVI to the Russian Imperial Court.

If confirmed, it would be by far the oldest champagne still drinkable in the world, thanks to the ideal conditions of cold and darkness.

"We have contacted (makers) Moet & Chandon and they are 98 percent certain it is Veuve Clicquot," Christian Ekström, the head of the diving team, told AFP.

"There is an anchor on the cork and they told me they are the only ones to have used this sign," he said, adding that a sample of the champagne has been sent to Moet & Chandon for their analysis.

The first bottles of Veuve Cliquot were produced in 1772 and aged for 10 years. Production was interrupted by the French revolution in 1788, so these bottles must be from between 1782 and 1787. The magic of alcohol and six atmospheres of pressure have kept the wine drinkable!

Aaland wine expert Ella Gruessner Cromwell-Morgan, whom Ekstroem asked to taste the find, said it had not lost its fizz and was "absolutely fabulous".

"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.

Cromwell-Morgan described the champagne as dark golden in colour with a very intense aroma.

"There's a lot of tobacco, but also grape and white fruits, oak and mead," she said of the wine's "nose".

As for the taste, "it's really surprising, very sweet but still with some acidity," the expert added, explaining that champagne of that period was much less dry than today and the fermentation process less controllable.

"One strong supposition is that it's part of a consignment sent by King Louis XVI to the Russian Imperial Court," Cromwell-Morgan said. "The makers have a record of a delivery which never reached its destination."

Call it the solution of a historical mystery. As usual with such things, ownership is a little bit unclear, especially since the ship seems to be within Finland's territorial waters. The Aaland authorities are meeting next week to decide who owns the find, which is potentially worth millions at auction.


Pop champagne ain't a damn thing change / Spray it in the air make it champagne rain

It's been a good couple years for ancient champagne. This week's find beats the previous record for oldest bottle of Veuve: in 2008 a Scot named Chris James found an 1893 bottle in Torosay Castle, Isle of Mull, Scotland. It had been locked in a dark cabinet along with other liquors since at least 1897. Last year there was a tasting of a bottle of 1825 Perrier-Jouet Champagne at the winemaker's cellars in Epernay. The champagne was sweeter than the contemporary version (it was topped up with brandy in the cask) but was a bit flat but with notes of "truffles, caramel and mushrooms."

Veuve Cliquot is quite important in the history of champagne. Madame Cliquot (the 'widow' or veuve in the brand name) ran the firm from 1805 to 1866 and transformed champagne from an artisanal to a mass produced product. With her staff she invented a vastly more efficient way of removing lees and yeast from the bottles (riddling) - making champagne a clear beverage for the first time. The Finnish bottles, from the 1780s, predate this transformation and represent an rare surviving example of a pre-industrial wine.

Up from the deeps!

Shipwrecked wine is not as unusual as you might think. Wine has been a widely traded commodity for, well, as long as people have been making wine (at least 7,000 years). Booze was an important part of the neolithic revolution and people have been greedy for it ever since. In other words, drinking wine is very stone age. Nicola at Edible Geography (another blog I love) has a great reflection on shipwrecked wines:

It appears the ocean floor, if treated as a single entity, might actually be the world’s largest wine cellar – a sunken treasure trove of lost vintages awaiting rediscovery. Like squirrels digging up acorns, wreck-divers and salvage companies stumble upon another forgotten cache every few years.

She also points out that drinking the stuff can actually have some archaeological value:

A 1996 paper published in the Australasian Historical Archaeology journal discusses the analysis of wines recovered from an 1841 shipwreck – the William Salthouse, in Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay – in terms of the evolution of Muscat. By combining chemical composition analysis with sensory data (i.e. sampling) and archival research, archaeologists with Heritage Victoria discovered that “Muscat was traditionally an unfortified style, quite different to today, due to a vinification technique called passerillage,” which created a wine with such high sugar levels that, to modern oenologists, it tastes like Sauternes.

Not that it's much of a challenge to convince archaeologists to drink wine. In fact one might wonder why the archaeology of booze is so underdeveloped, given the rampant drinking that besets the average dig.

I'll talk about wine recovered from Greek and Roman wrecks some other time. For now I'll leave you with some other more recent shipwrecked wine links, like the 1907 Heideseck discovered in a shipwreck a few years ago (mostly covered by luxury blogs, which ironically have really bad grammar and writing!) Also check out these wines recovered from the Titanic.

International Booty Battle

I can think of a lot of reasons to pay attention to international booty battles. In this case the reason is archaeological. As MSNBC reported Tuesday, treasure hunters have salvaged the Spanish warship Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, sunk by a British vessel in 1804, and carted off $500 million worth of gold and silver coins to a warehouse in Florida. When Spain discovered what was going on, they sent a warship to board and detain the salvors, led by a Greg Stemm, a bearded American with a fondness for turtlenecks.

It’s an interesting case from the legal perspective: under international law, objects carried on a merchant vessel are fair game for salvage, but those on a warship continue to belong to the nation-state. Stemm, however, argues that the coins were being carried by the warship under contract to a third party, and thus were never really government property. The case is currently in US District Court in Florida.

As usually happens when I read about archaeology in the news, the whole case degenerates into ambiguity and contradiction the more I think about it. Greg Stemm runs one of these private salvage outfits, which don’t quite merit the word ‘archaeology’ since their point is to haul up giant piles of precious metals and sell them to coin collectors. I dislike the way that salvage types hide their quest for personal enrichment under a mantle of scientific earnestness.

The government of Spain, naturally, feels aggrieved at Stemm’s discovery:

"The ship is the history and national patrimony of Spain, not a site that may be covertly stripped of valuables to sell to collectors. Odyssey was well aware that it is off limits,” said Spain’s American attorney in the case, James Goold.

This would be fine if the artifacts in this case didn’t have such a sinister side. Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes got full of silver and gold because the Spanish crown enslaved millions of Indians and worked them to death in the mines of Potosí. It is true that slavery and imperialism are major parts of Spain’s “cultural patrimony”, but what the government is appealing to is simply generic, decontextualized nationalism. Spain wants to launder dirty money through the bank of noble principles: an oblivious move at best and a cynical one at worst.

Stemm, of course, has offered to “share” the booty:

“We suggested, ‘You know what? Let’s do a split here. You should have all the cultural artifacts.’ We said, if this is a Spanish shipwreck, we think that the cultural artifacts should go to Spain. We just think we should be properly rewarded for spending the money, doing great archaeology.”

This is an amusing f-you gesture: we’ll give you the ‘cultural artifacts’ and keep the coins. This means what? Nails? Bits of wood and pottery? Some ship’s fittings? He has a good point, in that Spain wouldn’t probably give a damn about the archaeology of the wreck if $500m wasn’t involved. (I love his feeling that "great archaeology" deserves multi-million dollar payoffs. Sounds like a new lobbying agenda for AIA and SAA.)

The archaeological heritage of the ocean is vast and nearly untouched, and this case points out the need for better education and policy moves around salvage in international waters. I don’t particularly care if private interests excavate a shipwreck – especially because most governments have no plans to spend the millions of dollars required to do good underwater archaeology. But they should record their finds well and publish them in a timely way – something that I seriously doubt Stemm and his team will do. (Though I would love to be proved wrong.) It would also be much preferable to see salvors getting a percentage of the proceeds from shipwreck salvage, with the balance going to an international fund for heritage conservation.

Treasure ships like the Mercedes carried blood money from the holocaust that Spain wrought on the peoples of the Americas, and whoever recovers the money should treat it a such. My ideal solution to the legal wrangle? Stemm and Spain both take 10% of the proceeds from the ship, and the balance put into a reparations fund for development and education in indigenous communities in Latin America.