Exploration of wreck finds World War I-vintage champagne, cognac...

The first of what is believed to be 5000 bottles of champagne, 35.000 liters of cognac in wooden barrels and 6000 liters wine were brought to the surface on the 11th of July 1997 from a vessel torpedoed by a German navy attack submarine in the Baltic during World War I. Claes Bergvall and Peter Lindberg discovered the wreck of the Swedish-registry 25-meter ketch Jönköping about 46 kilometers/28 miles from Rauma, Finland, where it was headed. The champagne has been identified as the Heidsieck & Co.'s 1907, of Reims, France. In green bottles, it still has its light golden colour, sweet taste and fine bubbles, according to people who have sampled it in Stockholm, Sweden. The "gout Americain," or "American taste" champagne, was preserved in ideal conditions of complete darkness and a temperature of 1 ° Celsius at 62 meters deep. The Jönköping left Gävle, Sweden, on 28th of October, 1916, for Rauma and Petrograd [St Petersburg?], Russia, with wine for the central bank of Finland and champagne and cognac for the Russian army. The wooden, two-masted ship was sunk by the German submarine U-22, which also sank six other ships around the same time. Bergvall and Lindberg read of the ship and its cargo in a book and used Swedish archives to locate it.

Updated 1997-07-21 by Lars Bruzelius

Sjöhistoriska Samfundet | The Maritime History Virtual Archives.