A haul of champagne, which had lain at the bottom of the sea for more than 170 years, has finally been analysed.
But the chemist behind the work, Philippe Jeandet, admitted he had been allowed to taste less than a meagre thimbleful.
In 2010, divers uncovered 168 bottles of Veuve Clicquot champagne dating back to the 1830s on a Finnish ship wreck off the Aland islands between Sweden and Finland.
Dr Jeandet, 55, food biochemistry professor at Reims university, was given just a tiny sample from a single bottle to analyse.
“Many people think I have had an opportunity to taste the wine, but that’s wrong,” he said. “A bottle is 750 millilitres and we got two milliletres. One time, my colleague decided to put on my hand just 0.1 millilitre so I could taste it. It was impossible to put it in a glass, so he put it on my hand using a syringe. That was my sole tasting experiment.”
Nevertheless, he was able to publish the first results of his year-long study of the world’s oldest bubbly.
“It was amazing,” he said. “It had a tobacco aroma. It was such a great moment.”
The tests found far much more added salt and gelatine than used today and “three or four times the sugar content of a Coca-Cola”. Grape syrup was also added to make the drink sweeter.
The study also confirmed that the notes made by Mme Clicquot at the time of production were accurate.
“It is the first time we’ve been able to make a parallel between the archives of Mme Clicquot and a chemical analysis of the wine,” said Dr Jeandet. “We were surprised to see the wines were very well-preserved. They spent more than 170 years at the bottom of the sea but in terms of chemical composition and aroma, they retained the intrinsic features of champagne.”
