Champagne found on 19th-century shipwreck off Sweden is declared off limits

No one will be allowed to fish out any of the nearly 100 bottles of 19th-century Champagne and mineral water nestled in a shipwreck off southern Sweden without proper authorization, officials said Wednesday.

Though the wreck’s location has been known since 2016 and is registered in Sweden’s National Antiquities Office’s cultural environment, it was only on July 11 that Polish scuba divers found the precious cargo.

The wreck, which sits at about 190 feet deep off the coast of the southern Sweden county of Blekinge, was found by the divers while they were checking spots of interest about 20 nautical miles south of the Swedish Baltic Sea island of Oeland.

“I’ve been a diver for 40 years. From time to time, you see one or two bottles,” Tomasz Stachura, who leads the team, told CBS News’ partner network BBC News. “But I’ve never seen crates with bottles of alcohol and baskets of water like this.”

Wine and water experts have quickly contacted the divers and been vying to carry out laboratory tests on the contents of the bottles, according to Stachura. However, Swedish authorities have put their foot down and labeled the sunken ship “an ancient relic” which the county says requires “a clear and strong protection” to remain intact.

“You must not damage the ancient remains, which also includes taking items from the wreck, e.g. champagne bottles, without permission from the county,” Magnus Johansson, a county official told The Associated Press. “The champagne bottles are a fantastically well-preserved find that gives us a snapshot of shipping and life on board at the end of the 19th century,” he added.

Had the wreck been from before 1850, it would automatically have been listed as an ancient relic, local authorities said.

“But we have established that the cultural and historical values of the wreck were so high that it should be declared as an ancient relic,” Daniel Tedenlind, a county official in neighboring Kalmar.

Stachura, the diver, earlier said it was believed that the cargo could have been on the way to the royal table in Stockholm or the Russian tsar’s residence in St. Petersburg when the ship sank sometime in the second half of the 19th century.

Champagne has been discovered on historic shipwrecks before.

In 2011, a bottle of nearly 200-year-old champagne found in a shipwreck at the bottom of the Baltic Sea sold for 30,000 euros at an auction in Finland, the BBC reported. The year before, diving instructor Christian Ekstrom and his team discovered 30 or so bottles of bubbly on a sunken ship near the Aland Islands. Ekstrom said the bottles, found at a depth of 200 feet, were believed to be from the 1780s and likely were part of a cargo destined for Russia.