The rise of undersea champagne: ‘I have never tasted such a wine in my life’

Discovery of intact bottles on 1852 shipwreck sparks development of underwater ageing process

You might think that 1,500 years after the first bottle was drunk there wasn’t much more innovation left to be had in the rarefied world of champagne. You would be wrong. The next big thing in the £6bn-a-year industry is: undersea ageing.

Like so many of the world’s best innovations, it began by accident. In 2010, a group of divers in Finland’s Åland archipelago came across the wreck of a ship that sank in 1852 and were surprised to find 145 bottles of champagne 160ft below the surface. Even more surprisingly, the bottles were still full and tasted – in the words of a professor of food biochemistry – “incredible – I have never tasted such a wine in my life”.