“Wet hair.”
That’s the tasting note some people gave after sampling one of the nearly 50 bottles of Veuve Clicquot champagne a team of divers discovered at the bottom of the Baltic Sea in 2010. Clearly not everyone shared that opinion about the vintage bubbly (circa 1839 to 1841), because a bottle from the discovered set was auctioned off in Finland for a then-world record of $43,900.
Given that price and his opinion that the Champagne had been preserved in “close to perfect” condition, Veuve Clicquot cellar master Dominique Demarville decided to imitate the aging process and built a storage container designed for deep-sea aging called the “Aland Vault.”
Last year, Demarville dropped 350 bottles of Veuve Clicquot — including some 2004 Rosé and non-vintage Yellow Label — 130 feet below the surface. He plans to monitor them for 40 years. The hope is that the “absence of light, constant low temperature and pressure equivalent to that of the bottles” will once again make the Baltic Sea an ideal “cellar,” according to Veuve Clicquot.
Hopefully Davy Jones doesn’t drink it all.
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