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The Shipwreck’s Champagne — Follow up
In May 1997 Peter Lindberg and Claes Bergvall were doing research in the Stockholm Naval Historical Archives. They were the wreck salvage company C-Star’s owners, and they had ever been looking for new opportunities. They thus discovered the protest that Captain Eriksson had filed with the Swedish crown over the appropriation and sinking of his ship by the German Navy, and the name of the submarine’s commander, Karl Scherb.
The coordinates were accurate, and so they organized a salvage mission together with a seabed protection association, headed to the spot indicated by the documentation and located the sunken ship and the crates with champagne bottles and claimed ownership.
The champagne had been hidden in the silt of the Baltic Sea about 60–65 meters below the surface, and the 2,000 bottles found whole had remained undisturbed for more than 80 years. The pressure at a depth of 60 meters is about six atmospheres, almost identical to that of champagne into the bottle: in other words, the pressure inside and out was almost equal, and the corks had held.
In addition, the temperature was constantly around 4°C and at that depth, submerged in silt, the wines were in…
