The perfect wine cellar might be at the bottom of the sea. Time and again, divers have hauled bottles out of centuries-old shipwrecks and found the wine inside not merely intact but delicious — and it turns out the cold, black, motionless deep provides very nearly ideal conditions for ageing wine. A disaster for the ship can be a gift to the bottle1.
Quick facts
- The seabed offers a steady ~4°C, total darkness and no oxygen — near-perfect ageing.
- In 2010 divers found 168 bottles of 1840s champagne in a Baltic shipwreck.
- One recovered bottle sold at auction for €30,000.
- Wineries now deliberately age wine underwater to see if the sea improves it.
The cellar on the seabed
Why does wine survive so well underwater? The deep sea happens to tick every box a great cellar should. The temperature is steady and cold — around 4°C year-round, whatever the season at the surface — and it is utterly dark, eliminating the “lightstrike” that spoils wine exposed to light2.
Down there the pressure of the water helps hold corks tightly in place, sealing out oxygen, so submerged bottles oxidise far more slowly than those in a cellar. And for sparkling wine there is a final, almost magical touch: the gentle, ceaseless motion of the sea is said to keep the wine alive and to refine its bubbles. Nature, it seems, built the ultimate wine store and hid it under the waves6.
The Baltic champagne
The most spectacular proof came in 2010. Divers exploring a shipwreck off the Åland Islands, in the Baltic between Sweden and Finland, found a cargo of 168 bottles of champagne from a ship that had gone down in the early 1840s1. Marks on the corks identified them as the work of the great houses Veuve Clicquot, Heidsieck and Juglar — among the oldest drinkable champagne ever found.
When the bottles were opened, the wine was astonishingly alive: golden, still faintly sparkling, tasting of honey and fruit after 170 years on the seabed. The rarity was staggering, and so were the prices — at auction in 2011, a single bottle of the 1841 Veuve Clicquot fetched a world-record €30,000, and a Juglar €24,0002.
The perfect wine cellar may be at the bottom of the sea.— on shipwreck wine6
The champagne that went to war
Some sunken wine carries a whole history with it. In 1916, during the First World War, a German U-boat torpedoed the Swedish freighter Jönköping as it carried a cargo of champagne toward the imperial court of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia3. The wine — Heidsieck & Co Monopole 1907, made to Russian taste — sank to the Baltic floor.
There it waited until 1998, when a Swedish expedition located the wreck 64 metres down and raised around 2,400 bottles of the 1907 Heidsieck — wine cellared, by pure accident, in perfect conditions for eighty years, and since sold as some of the most expensive champagne in the world4. The sea has been swallowing wine far longer than this, of course: ancient Greek and Roman wrecks still litter the Mediterranean floor with amphorae, their wine long gone but their cargo perfectly mapped.
Wineries take the plunge
Faced with such stories, winemakers began to wonder: if the sea ages wine so beautifully by accident, why not do it on purpose? In recent years deep-sea ageing has grown into a genuine trend, with producers lowering cases of wine — especially champagne — into the sea in purpose-built underwater cellars5.
| Find | Wine | The story |
|---|---|---|
| Åland Islands, 2010 | 1840s champagne | ~168 bottles; a bottle sold for €30,000 |
| The Jönköping (sunk 1916) | Heidsieck 1907 | Champagne for the Russian court; raised in 1998 |
| Ancient wrecks | Roman & Greek wine | Amphorae resting on the seabed for millennia |
Whether the sea truly makes wine better is still debated, and sceptics suspect the romance does some of the work5. But the experiments continue, and the results are intriguing enough that the ocean floor is quietly becoming a fashionable place to keep a bottle.
Sunken treasure
There is something irresistible about wine raised from the deep1. It joins two of the great human passions — the sea and the vine — and it proves, in the most romantic way imaginable, that the humble conditions wine loves best are cold, darkness and stillness. Sometimes the finest cellar of all is the one no one built: the quiet floor of the sea, keeping its bottles safe for a hundred years and more.
Frequently asked questions
More from this day in wine history
See everything else that happened on July 15 — who was born, what was bottled, and which laws were signed.
Read more
- Why champagne is connected to wealth
- Wine and historical trade routes
- From barrels to bottled vintages
References
- Smithsonian Magazine — 170-Year-Old Champagne Recovered and Tasted from a Baltic Shipwreck. ↑
- Live Science — 170-Year-Old Champagne Recovered from the Bottom of the Sea. ↑
- Quill & Pad — 1907 Heidsieck Monopole Goût Américain: the world’s most expensive champagne. ↑
- VinePair — This Prized Champagne Has Been in Two Historic Shipwrecks (1907 Heidsieck). ↑
- Wine Enthusiast — Deep-Sea Ageing Is a Growing Trend. But Does It Improve Wine? ↑
- Club Oenologique — Ageing wine underwater: how Champagne matures under the sea. ↑
Recommended reading
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