In other news ☞
Please excuse my quick-sketch skills of an artist, but no camera was nearby when I witnessed this scene at a[n unnamed] communal dining establishment.
To my surprise, this juice-like-beverage distribution ceremony was not conducted in total secrecy. So this is the sort of jernt I frequent now.
Meanwhile: I’m pretty enthusiastic over 110-proof (!) beer, but so-called ‘rouge taxidermy’, neotaxidermy, ‘ironic’ taxidermy, whateveryoucallit has always struck me as insincere, puerile, and desperate. The contrast leaves me with a break-even, non-opinion of this offering…
But at £500 per bottle, my non-opinion is irrelevant.
Finally: maybe ancient champagne isn’t impressive. But what if the bottles in question are ~230 years old? What if the bottles were stored under fifty-five meters of water for all those years? What if the water in question was, in fact, the Baltic Sea? Then? No?
I guess what impresses me is the diver’s first impulse after retrieving the bottle and discovering it was still full – he just opened it up and drank the stuff on the spot. Take note! That’s the kind of thoughtful, solemn reverence for the sanctity of artifacts one expects of such underwater archeologists!
Turns out this partay cargo was on a boat sent by Louis XVI to the court of Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg. It’s a complete anomaly of history (to say the least) that a scuba-diving Viking raider got to the Clicquot before Catherine T. did.
Screw the sanctity of artifacts, right? Nice turn of phrase, by the way. That’s the sweetest instance of ‘living in the now’ that I’ve seen all year. ;)
Coincidentally, I heard that these champagnes were very much over-sweet. Either from the unanticipated aging, or because that’s how they drank them back then – I’m not sure which.