A bottle of wine recovered intact four years ago from the 1864 wreck of a US Civil War blockade runner that sank off the coast of Bermuda was uncorked and sipped by a panel of experts on Friday during a food festival in Charleston, South Carolina.
The verdict: A heady sulfur bouquet with distinct notes of saltwater and gasoline.
The wine was uncorked at a Charleston Wine and Food event titled: “From Deep Below: A Wine Event 150 Years in the Making.”
Photo: Reuters
About 50 people bought tickets to watch as a panel of wine experts decanted and tasted it, organizers said.
“I’ve had shipwreck wines before,” sommelier Paul Roberts said. “They can be great.”
This one, obviously, was not.
Photo: Reuters
To peals of audience laughter, the panel said the cloudy yellow-gray liquid smelled and tasted like a mixture of crab water, gasoline, salt water and vinegar, with hints of citrus and alcohol.
It could have been a Spanish fortified wine, a spirit or medicine. However, after 151 years at the bottom of the ocean, it is now mostly saltwater, they said.
Wine chemist Pierre Louis Teissedre of the University of Bordeaux, who had analyzed samples drawn through the cork earlier, said the “nose” of the wine was a room-clearing mix of camphor, stagnant water, hydrocarbons, turpentine and sulfur.
Analysis showed it was 37 percent alcohol, he said.
The wine was one of five sealed bottles recovered by marine archeologists from the Mary-Celestia, an iron-hulled sidewheel steamship that sank under mysterious circumstances during the US Civil War.
The boat was leaving Bermuda with supplies for the Confederate States when it struck a reef and sank in six minutes, said Philippe Rouja, a cultural anthropologist and custodian of historic shipwrecks for the Bermudan government.
Whether the sinking was deliberate or accidental has been debated.
Rouja and his brother, Jean-Pierre Rouja, were diving on the shipwreck in 2011 after winter storms swept over the site when they found a bottle of wine inside a secret boatswain’s locker in the bow.
Subsequent dives turned up the additional bottles, as well as sealed bottles of perfume, women’s shoes, hairbrushes and pearl shell buttons, Philippe Rouja said.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, which was fought from 1861 to 1865 and began in Charleston Harbor with the Battle of Fort Sumter.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing