champagne

By Franck Andrews - CBS News

A team of divers has discovered a massive haul of champagne and wine on a shipwreck on the floor of the Baltic Sea.

On a recent dive trip off the coast of Sweden, the Polish diving group BaltiTech spotted what looked like an old fishing boat on their sonar, 20 or so nautical miles south of the Aland islands, between Sweden and Finland.

"At first, there were doubts whether there would be anyone willing to go down," they said in a post on their website. But two of them decided to jump in and head down for a quick look.

When they didn't return for two hours, the rest of the team suspected "there was something very interesting on the bottom."

Their hunch was right. The divers swam down to discover a 19th century sailing ship "in very good condition, loaded to the sides with champagne, wine, mineral water and porcelain."

"I've been a diver for 40 years. From time to time, you see one or two bottles," Tomasz Stachura, who leads the team, told CBS News' partner network BBC News.

"But I've never seen crates with bottles of alcohol and baskets of water like this." "We certainly saw more than 100 bottles of champagne and baskets of mineral water in clay bottles," said the group.

The clay bottles helped the group establish the shipment was produced between 1850 and 1867.

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