81-Year-Old Bubbly Hits Spot For Divers

Five a.m. might be too early for champagne, but 81 years isn’t too late.

Members of the C Star diving consortium said bottoms-up Monday morning to a cache of 81-year-old champagne they had just salvaged from a World War I shipwreck at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.

“The champagne tasted superb,” Claes Bergvall told the Swedish news agency TT. He is part of the consortium that found the wreck last month under 210 feet of water in the Gulf of Finland.

The schooner Joenkoeping was laden with tens of thousands of bottles of cognac, champagne and red wine when it was sunk by a German U-boat in 1916.

The diving consortium doesn’t know how much of the cargo is intact, but hopes it will fetch huge sums at auction.