Some time in the 1780s, when the United States of America was still a fledgling nation, a ship left the court of King Louis XVI of France bound for the northern ports of Tsarist Russia. The ship contained, among other things, twenty bottles of the finest Veuve Cliquot champagne for the Tsar’s court. Let’s hope the ship’s owners had boat insurance, since the vessel went to the bottom off the coast of Finland, denying the Tsar his bit of the bubbly around the time that revolutionaries were denying good King Louis XVI continued use of his cranium.

The ship remains were discovered this summer by divers, who found the twenty bottles of champagne, still packaged, still amber, and still bubbly. By all appearances, the champagne, originally produced sometime during the 1870s or 1880s was still drinkable.

The divers may not have been wine speculators, but apparently, they enjoy a bit of the bubbly themselves. Originally bringing a single bottle to the surface predominantly for the purposes of identifying and dating the shipwreck, the divers decided to celebrate with the champagne when they discovered that it still appeared drinkable. And, indeed it was still drinkable.

According to one of the divers, the champagne “had a sweet taste and you could taste oak and it had a very strong tobacco smell.” It is not yet certain how many bottles were on the shipwreck, or if the champagne bottles are indeed of Cliquot vintage. What is certain is that those men downed a very expensive bottle of champagne.

If the bottles are what they are believed to be, they are expected to instantly become the most expensive champagne in the world. The most expensive wine of any sort, for that matter. Each bottle is estimated at half a million Swedish kroner. That’s about $68,000 for us Americans. Bottom line, those are some damned expensive bottles of champagne. By comparison, 1907 Heidsieck Monopole, a Bordeaux found on a shipwreck was previously the world’s most expensive bottle of wine and sold for a comparably paltry $35,000 per bottle. It kind of makes you wonder if the ship’s captain had any idea how valuable his cargo would be someday when he was trying to decide how much boat insurance to take out.