When you think of wine, where do you think the wine is stored?  A cellar, right?  I mean, that’s why it’s a wine cellar, not a wine attic.   You keep wine in the cellar because you need to keep it in a cool, dark place to preserve its taste.  As a team of divers lead by Christian Ekstroem have discovered, there’s no better place to preserve a bottle of champagne than off the coast of Finland’s Aaland Island, where a recently-discovered shipwreck yielded up to 30 bottles of perfectly preserved Veuve Clicquot champagne from the time of Louis XVI!

If this is as old as is believed, it will be the oldest drinkable champagne ever discovered, far older than the 1825 bottle of Perrier-Jouet tasted by experts in London last year.  The bottle is estimated to have been bottled between 1782, when Moet & Chandon released the first of their 10-year-old bottles, and 1789, when the French Revolution threw off the champagne industry for a few years.

“We have contacted (makers) Moet & Chandon and they are 98 percent certain it is Veuve Clicquot,” Ekstroem told AFP.  “There is an anchor on the cork and they told me they are the only ones to have used this sign.”  Ella Gruessner Cromwell-Morgan, the lucky wine expert to taste the find, describes it as tasting of “a lot of tobacco, but also grape and white fruits, oak and mead,” with a dark-golden hue and a strong aroma.

Tags: Veuve Clicquot, Moet & Chandon, King Louis XVI, Christian Ekstroem, 230-year-old champagne discovered in shipwreck, Aaland Island, Finland, shipwreck champagne recovered, the world’s oldest drinkable champagne

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