• Shipwrecked champagne brand still a mystery

MARIEHAMN (AFP) - Wine experts Wednesday popped the corks of two bottles of champagne recently salvaged from the bottom of the Baltic Sea, where they had lain in a sunken ship for nearly 200 years.

They gently eased the fragile corks from the dark brown bottles -- one from the house of Veuve-Clicquot and the other from the now extinct house of Juglar, in front of an large audience of reporters and wine enthusiasts in the capital of the autonomous Finnish province of Aaland.

The first taste went to Richard Juhlin, one of the world's foremost champagne experts, who could not hold back an appreciative "Ah!"

He described the Juglar as "more intense and powerful, mushroomy," and the Veuve-Clicquot as more like Chardonnay, with notes of "linden blossoms and lime peels".

As the contents were poured into rows of waiting glasses for others, the aroma was more pungent than any modern wine or champagne: a thick, nose-wrinkling and quite cheesy bouquet that could be smelled several metres (yards) away.

"Madame Clicquot herself must have tasted this same batch," Francois Hautekeur, a Veuve-Clicquot representative, told AFP, referring to Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin, who reigned over the famous house.

The historic estate announced Wednesday it had discovered that three or four bottles of its produce were found among the 168 salvaged bottles.

"For everyone at Veuve-Clicquot, it's like winning a championship," Hautekeur said.

The remarkable bottles were discovered in a two-masted schooner which had run aground sometime between 1825 and 1830, said Aaland's top museum official Viveka Loendal, making it most likely the world's oldest champagne.

"It was probably going to be served on a high-class Finnish table," she told reporters.

Instead, it was served to an eager international press corps, as a push by the tiny province to turn the sudden interest in sunken treasure into a marketing blitz for Aaland tourism.

"In cases like these, the joy comes not from the champagne's taste, but from the chance to share a bottle like this with others," Pekka Nuikki, an expert who has sampled many 19th century champagnes, told AFP before the event.

"What more could a person ask for than to have been lucky enough to taste champagne that's more than 200 years old? And if it's excellent too, then wow," he added.

The deputy head of the Aaland government, Britt Lundberg, announced that the the province planned to auction off one bottle of each make.

Juhlin told AFP that either bottle could fetch 100,000 euros (135,000 dollars).

Following the auction, Aaland plans to mix the shipwrecked champagne with younger vintages and sell them.

However, Riikka Alvik, from Finland's National Board of Antiquities, told AFP before the event that she had hoped the Aaland authorities would have treated every bottle as a museum piece.

"We would never have just auctioned off museum objects like that," she said.

In the crowd, the diver who discovered the precious cargo, Christian Ekstroem, watched as others drank what he salvaged.

He had already tasted his share straight from the first bottle he brought up, expecting to get a mouthful of seawater.

"But it wasn't seawater after all," he told AFP, grinning.

The wreck also held an undisclosed number of bottles of what is believed to be the world's oldest drinkable beer. The Aaland authorities intend to sell some of it to brewers who can recreate it from the same yeast root.