A team of marine archaeologists has serendipitously found a remarkable object on the Baltic seabed: a 19th-century wreck of a sailing ship that contains over 100 bottles of champagne and mineral water, many of which are still unopened.
According to a release from Baltictech, the diving company that made the find, the wreck rests several dozen miles south of Sweden.
“We were just checking out new spots, which I had been collecting for years, out of pure curiosity, and that’s when we came across this wreck,” Tomasz Stachura, the leader of the dive team, told CNN. “We did not expect it to be anything significant and even hesitated for a moment whether to dive at all.”
The clay bottles of mineral water are in baskets, well-preserved and accessible to the dive team. Mineral water was a valuable item in its day and transports of the stuff would’ve been escorted by police, according to Baltictech.
The mineral water, branded by the company Selters, comes from a German town of the same name where mineral water has been bottled for over 800 years, according to CNN. Members of the dive team said many of the champagne and water bottles were still sealed.
Based on a stamp on the bottles, the team was able to identify the transport aboard the vessel to between 1850 and 1867, dating the timing of the wreck with some precision.
Stachura is no stranger to the shipwrecks of the Baltic Sea. In 2020, he was part of a team that explored the Nazi-era steamship Karlsruhe, the first time the wreck had been seen by human eyes in 75 years.
Subsequent investigations of Karlsruhe in 2021 identified china, vehicles, and wartime cargo. Confusingly, two wrecks named Karlsruhe were found in 2021; one was the steamer investigated by the Baltictech team, while the other was a Nazi warship that sunk off the coast of Norway in 1940.
The team plans to revisited the newly discovered wreck next year, when they hope to be more prepared to investigate the wreck.
