Veuve Clicquot buries champagne in Baltic Sea for 50 years

Veuve Clicquot has lowered hundreds of bottles of champagne deep into the Baltic Sea in an ageing experiment that also commemorates the discovery of shipwrecked bottles in the same area four years ago.

Three hundred regular bottles and 50 magnums of bubbly encaged in a specially built, underwater cellar, dubbed the Aland Vault after the Aland shipwreck off the coast of Finland, will remain buried for 50 years.

In 2010, divers near Finland's autonomous Aland archipelago uncovered a cache of more than 165 bottles from champagne houses Veuve Clicquot, Heidsieck & Co and the now defunct house of Juglar on the seafloor in a shipwreck dating between 1825 and 1830.




The haul dated back to 1839. The deliberately submerged Veuve Clicquot bottles lie 40m below the surface, where they'll be monitored and occasionally retrieved for tastings.

Veuve Clicquot is the latest winery to experiment with underwater aging. Others to have done it include Mira from the US and Larrivet Haut-Brion in Bordeaux. The Baltic Sea offers unique ageing conditions for its low levels of salinity and a constant temperature of 4 degree C.