Bottles

What do you call this run of days between Christmas Day and New Year's Day? Some label it 'Betwixtmas' , which I quite like; others 'the week that time forgot' , which I can well understand - for every day feels like a Saturday (and I should be blogging) or is it a Sunday?; and then there's 'Winterlude', suggestive of a time of calm before everything starts again, resolutions, pressure of work, 2025 already. 

It's a time for drinking wine and eating imaginatively recycled leftovers, for snuggling up warm to enjoy a new book, watching the twinkling tree lights without dwelling on thoughts of having to clear everything away.

I've shared a few bottles of wine with family and friends over the last festive days, except for the retsina (with turkey and stuffing baps) on Christmas Eve. No one wanted to share that one. Cue a debate about baps versus barms versus cobs versus buns versus rolls if you must, but I want to talk about bottles.

Specifically, with New Year celebrations just days away, I want to talk about champagne bottles, and in particular champagne that has lain in shipwrecked boats at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, in some cases (no pun intended) for nearly two hundred years. 

bottle of 1840 champagne found in 2010 off the coast of Finland and still drinkable

There have been a number of 'finds' over the last few decades of cargos that went down on ships wrecked while plying their trade between France/Germany (both big wine producers) and the countries bordering the Baltic Sea to the north and east. 

The area is noted for sudden, squally storms and many ships foundered in an age when they were vulnerable wooden sailing vessels at the mercy of strong winds and high seas. Their cargos went to the bottom in the holds of the ships and much of the produce didn't survive the calamity, but bottles were among the more durable items.

Take for instance the 168 bottles of Veuve Clicquot discovered in a wreck off Finland in 2010. That ship was believed to have been on its way to the Baltic port of St. Petersburg in Russia. In the mid 19th century, Russia was the biggest market for champagne outside of France. The consignment of champagne, 1840 vintage, had survived the plunge, bottles undamaged, corks still intact, contents bubbly and fresh as the day they were bottled, for the Baltic sea has a low saline content (it's more like a freshwater lake), the seabed is dark and the temperature down there is an almost constant 4 degrees Celsius all year round.

Experts pronounced the wine still very fine indeed. Some of it was subsequently sold at auction for ridiculous amounts, but the champagne industry as a result is now embarked on an forty year experiment to determine if storing champagne at the bottom of the Baltic Sea might be a viable green alternative to the traditional method of keeping it in refrigerated chalk caves (lower carbon footprint et cetera). 

If I were Heidsieck, Moët & Chandon, Taittinger or Veuve Clicquot, I'd worry about piracy or sabotage. With Chinese and Russian 'merchant' ships deliberately dragging their anchors along the seabed to damage gas pipelines and telecommunication cables between NATO countries bordering the Baltic, anything might happen.

But then I'm not particularly fond of champagne in the first place. I much prefer my wine without bubbles, thank you, be it red, rosé or white.

treasures from the wine dark sea

I was going to write a new poem for this blog, all about shipwrecked wine, but confess I've just not had the time and the hour is getting late. (Maybe the poem will emerge at some point, they usually do.) 

Instead, here are some lines from a long fantasy poem,  A Wine Of Wizardry, by the American poet George Sterling, written in San Francisco circa 1904. Hugely influential at the time, it is still worth reading - after a glass or two...

from A Wine Of Wizardry

But Fancy, well affrighted at his gaze,

Flies to a violet headland of the West,

About whose base the sun-lashed billows blaze,

Ending in precious foam their fatal quest,

As far below the deep-hued ocean molds,

With waters' toil and polished pebbles' fret,

The tiny twilight in the jacinth set,

The wintry orb the moonstone-crystal holds,

Snapt coral twigs and winy agates wet,

Translucencies of jasper, and the folds

Of banded onyx, and vermilion breast

Of cinnabar. Anear on orange sands,

With prows of bronze the sea-stained galleys rest,

And swarthy mariners from alien strands

Stare at the red horizon, for their eyes

Behold a beacon burn on evening skies,

As fed with sanguine oils at touch of night.

Forth from that pharos-flame a radiance flies,

To spill in vinous gleams on ruddy decks;

And overside, when leap the startled waves

And crimson bubbles rise from battle-wrecks,

Unresting hydras wrought of bloody light

Dip to the ocean's phosphorescent caves.

                                              George Sterling (1869-1926) 

Cheers, S ;-)