LONDON — The Baltic Sea floor is full of secrets. Untold thousands of sailors have died beneath its cold waves, some lost to battle, some to weather and rocks. With them sank their ships — and their treasure.
This month, a Polish diving team slipped below the sea’s surface to check out a small wreck, just a few miles off Sweden. A first pass revealed a small, seemingly unremarkable merchant ship about 200 feet beneath the surface. But Tomasz Stachura, who leads the Baltictech diving group, had a hunch.
The next morning, he returned. This time, he found crates and crates of what appeared to be Champagne, along with wine and porcelain, almost as if the ship’s cargo had been headed to a party. “We realized that this was a kind of treasure,” he said.
He took photos and cleaned the labels, but they were illegible. However, the shape of the bottles suggested that they contained Champagne, he said. Looking closer, he saw bubbles.
“It came to me that, perhaps, they are drinkable.” Advertisement The wreck itself is hardly novel: Some 100,000 sunken ships dot the Baltic seabed, said Jim Hansson, a maritime archeologist at the Vrak Museum of Wrecks in Sweden. But finding Champagne would be a marvel.
“It’s not so common,” he said, between dives with the Swedish coast guard. Sparkling wine may have been even more of a luxury than it is today in the mid-1800s, which is when Stachura thinks the ship may have sunk. (An archeologist analyzed bottles of mineral water, a r.