In 2010, a team of divers made an astonishing discovery off the Aland archipelago.

47 shipwrecked bottles of Veuve Clicquot champagne – elaborated and bottled during Madame Clicquot’s lifetime – that had been submerged for almost 200 years.

Amazed by the wine’s near intact state owing to its peak ageing performance and the ideal cellaring conditions created by the sea bed, the House decided to launch an unprecedented experiment: The Cellar in the Sea.

Aiming to further fine-tune Veuve Clicquot’s expert understanding of the ageing process, a selection of the House’s finest wines was committed to the depths of the Baltic sea, its progress to be monitored periodically over 40 years and compared against a set of control bottles kept in the House’s famed chalk caves in Reims.

In 2017, three years after the inauguration of this singular project by Cellar master Dominique Demarville, the bottles:Yellow Label, Vintage Rose 2004 and Demi-Sec were resurfaced marking the first comparative tasting of the Aland vault.

Wine experts’ concluded that while both methods provided excellent ageing conditions, the sea bed might be a better choice when it comes to wines intended to be aged for longer.