I recently came across this great story on the Vinography blog which told of a group of divers off the coast of Finland that discovered a shipwreck dating back to the late 18th century with several intact glass bottles of wine inside the wreck.
“So what did they do? What any self-respecting wine lover would do.They drank some,” Alder Yarrow wrote on Vinography.
“Believed to be Veuve Clicquot Champagne dating from between 1782 and 1788, the wine ‘had a very sweet taste, you could taste oak and it had a very strong tobacco smell. And there were very small bubbles’ according to diver Christian Ekstrom.”
Prior to this the oldest vintage of Champagne tasted was a 1825 vintage of Perrier-Jouet opened for wine experts and the media in 2009.