Four hundred cases of outstanding vintage bubbly that have lain undisturbed at the bottom of the Baltic for more than 80 years resurfaced again yesterday as the first World War wreck they sank in was finally raised - and no one popped a single cork.
"If you think we're going to crack a few of them open in celebration, I'm afraid you're mistaken," said Mr Claes Bergvall, head of the Swedish salvage team that has spent over a year trying to rescue the precious cargo. "They're worth far too damn much."
Speaking from the salvage vessel, Pernille Diver, about 25 miles off the western Finnish port of Rauma, Mr Bergvall said his crew of Danish, German and Swedish divers and engineers had freed the wooden hull of the 19th-century ketch Jonkoping from the Baltic mud in the early hours of the morning.
"It took most of the day to bring her up because we were being very, very careful," he said. "But eventually there she was. To tell you the truth, she looked pretty awful and smelled worse, but I've never seen anything so beautiful. And the bottles seem to be intact."
The Jonkoping, an 80-foot Swedish merchantman, went to the bottom in 210 feet of water in early 1916, after taking a direct hit from a German U-boat. It was carrying 5,000 bottles of champagne and 67 casks of fine cognac for officers of the Tsar of Russia's imperial army stationed in Finland, as well as 6,000 litres of vintage wines apparently ordered by the Central Bank in Helsinki.
The champagne, identified as a 1907 Heidsieck, has been declared eminently drinkable by French experts, having been stored for the best part of a century in near-ideal conditions: pitch darkness, and a mean temperature of minus 1 Celsius.
At a tasting of some of the 300 or so bottles brought up by divers since the wreck was discovered last spring, one connoisseur declared the taste to be "distinctly gout americain, slightly sweeter than we're used to now, but certainly a palatable wine. Blind, most people would put its age at about 10 years."
Mr Bergvall now hopes to get up to £1,500 a bottle for the champagne, and not much less for the cognac, which should fill 80,000 bottles once it has been blended.
