Shipwrecked Champagne Hoard Discovered Near Sweden

It sometimes feels like wine has a habit of falling into the briny deep. On July 23, Polish wreck diver and underwater photographer Tomasz Stachura announced that he and his Baltictech team had discovered the wreck of a 19th-century sailing ship near Öland, an island off the coast of Sweden—and it was crammed with bottles of Champagne and mineral water.

- -Collin Dreizen

"I have been diving for 40 years, and it often happens that there is one bottle or two... but to discover a wreck with so much cargo, it's a first for me," Stachura said in a statement.

Indeed, a fair amount of serendipity led to the find. "We were just checking out new spots, which I had been [researching] for years out of pure curiosity," said Stachura, who noted that the wreck looked like a regular fishing boat on his echosounder. "We did not expect it to be anything significant and even hesitated for a moment whether to dive at all." But divers Marek Cacaj and Pawel Truszynski did dive in and, over the course of about two hours, confirmed this wreck was packing bubbly.

Per Stachura, the divers counted more than 100 bottles of Champagne and mineral water, but there may very well be more down there: "There was so much of it that it was difficult for us to estimate the quantities," Stachura said in a Facebook post announcing the discovery.