Friend of a friend lives in Terrebone Parish and she spends time fishing and diving Timbalier Bay. Family used to have a sweet hut on the island there, but a storm leveled it long ago.
Anyway, she came up with this bottle and it’s likely from The Manilla, ill-fated boat shipwrecked more than two hundred years ago while carrying brandy & wine to New Orleans.
Here’s photos of the intact bottle, all the others found were in pieces.
Nice!
Audouze has cases of it. Says it’s not ready yet.
Rudybottle
Looks fake to me
Man, that’s awesome! What a cool find! And the color actually looks solid, ha!
I dig old/historical wine paraphernalia, and have a few pieces from ancient Greece/Rome. Here’s a couple
I would keep it refrigerated and see what it might fetch at auction. Doesn’t look half bad, minus the barnacles.
A known premox era
I’m waiting for The Gilded Sage’s tasting note.
Now that, is awesome.
Any idea which house might be best suited for a bottle like this Markus?
Sitting from the peanut gallery, I would look into houses that auction collectibles other than just wine, such as Southeby’s, Christie’s, and Heritage.
If the wreckage was particularly notable in local history, perhaps one that is in her area as well.
Very cool. I’m guessing someone could give a decent ID on what kind of wine as in where it was from. But no precise ID on things like producer and vintage. A great conversation piece.
Stuart George, a wine writer and UK merchant sent me this.
Recently I was contacted by a friend of a friend with an intriguing offer of some very old “shipwreck wines”.
The first of three offers was for a bottle of 1907 Heidsieck Monopole Goût Américain, recovered from the wreck of the Jönköping in the Gulf of Finland in 1997.
Jönköping was sunk by a U-Boat in 1916. She was apparently carrying over 4,000 bottles of champagne.
Asking price: €80,000.
I pointed out to the friend of a friend that two bottles of this are currently available from European suppliers at €4,125 and €5,000 respectively and that €80,000 was perhaps a bit ambitious.
The second offer was for a bottle of wine “believed to have come from a vessel called HMS Gloucester and sank (sic) in around 1682 after running aground… While the identification of the sunken ship is in progress (sic), two of the bottles were transported to the Technical University of Munich for laboratory analysis for quality and possible use/drink (sic)… Bottled and created for royalty this wine is still drinkable but there are only 8 bottles left in the world.”
Hmmm…
Upon closer examination, the "HMS Gloucester bottle” appeared to be the same as one of two bottles offered at auction in June 2019 (which were both unsold.)
Those two bottles were recovered from a wreck off the coast of Germany.
The bottle here looks like one of those; indeed, it’s the same photo that was used by the salvagers to publicise their work.
It clearly isn’t a bottle from HMS Gloucester, which sank off the coast of Norfolk.
Furthermore, the friend of a friend’s document said: “In 2018 an empty bottle, similar in form and time of manufacture, was sold at auction for £21,000.”
I think that I would have been aware of an empty bottle of wine selling for £21,000. I can find no record of it.
And £21,000 for an empty bottle…?
Lucky me that “This wine is currently only offered to private collections and connoisseurs of vintage wine. Selling price: Offers in the region of 70,000 Euros”. 
By the time that I got to the third offer of “unique cognac and liquor” salvaged from the wreck of a ship that sank in May 2017 in the Baltic, and now being marketed at “Offers in the region of 75,000 Euros” – well, I felt like jumping into the River Thames. (Not that I ever would – I can barely swim.)
My conclusion is: If you’re swimming in the ocean, beware of sharks…
Mark - which of the three photos I posted here is from the HMS Gloucester sale?
I’d like to point this out to my friend of three decades who sent these to me.
That would be a cool thing to have on the shelf.