Divers discover champagne 'on ice'

A secret stash of bubbly kept “on ice” for nearly 50 years inside a shipwreck on the bed of the English Channel has been creating some fizz around the dining tables of the divers who unearthed it, it was revealed today.

The treasure trove of 20,000 half bottles of champagne, thought to be of a 1950s vintage, was discovered buried in silt in the hold of a sunken French cargo ship.

Divers from the Folkestone Diving Club and other south-eastern clubs, who remain tight-lipped about exactly when they struck gold, dug out bottles to bring back to dry land and cracked them open with friends and family at dinner parties.

The group of 10 to 15 divers, who are equally as secretive about the exact location of the wreck except to say that it lies in the middle of a shipping channel, were granted permission to lift some of the bottles for tasting from the Receiver of Wreck.

They made their unusual find after echo-sounding equipment on board their ship detected the wreck and they then explored its hold on a further dive.

French cargo ship The Seine was en route for England when she sank after allegedly hitting a Russian freighter and succumbing to stormy seas on July 16, 1955.

It is believed the champagne she was carrying was bottled around five years earlier to commemorate the end of the golden guinea coin – which experts could see faintly stamped on foil on some of the corks.

Today some of the divers who discovered the champagne were publicly uncorking it for a tasting session at the Dorchester Hotel in central London.

Champagne expert Susie Barrie, a freelance writer for Decanter magazine, who was one of the first to sip the vintage said although somewhat “pongy” it tasted good.

She said: “Aged champagne is an acquired taste and often loses its fizz and this had lost most of its fizz. You either love it or hate it.

“It has that lovely amber-gold colour and honeyed, mineral aromas like a mushroomy smell. None of it’s unusual in old champagne. Some people would have smelled it and thought it was too pongy, but it really did taste absolutely fine.

“It certainly did not taste bad or spoiled, although there was just a hint of a fishy aroma and taste, but nothing major and it did not taste salty. You would not be able to tell it was from a shipwreck.”