Civil War wine failed to age well
below and off coast of Bermuda

Wine ages best under controlled conditions. And the bowels of a sunken ship is not one of them.

A bottle of wine recovered intact four years ago from the 1864 wreck of a Civil War blockade runner was uncorked and sipped by a panel of experts recently during a food festival in Charleston, S.C.

The verdict: A heady sulfur bouquet with distinct notes of saltwater and gasoline. It also was determined that the vintage suffered tremendously from being submerged for more than 150 years off the coast of Bermuda.

The wine was uncorked at a Charleston Wine + Food event titled “From Deep Below: A Wine Event 150 Years in the Making.” About 50 people bought tickets to watch as a panel of wine experts decanted and tasted the wine.

“I’ve had shipwreck wines before,” master sommelier Paul Roberts said. “They can be great.”

This one, obviously, was not.

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. But after 151 years at the bottom of the ocean, it’s 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.

The wine was one of five sealed bottles recovered by marine archaeologists from the Mary-Celestia, an iron-hulled side-wheel steamship that sank under mysterious circumstances during the Civil War.

The boat was leaving Bermuda with supplies for the Confederate states when it struck a reef and sank in six minutes. Whether the sinking was deliberate or accidental has been debated.

In 2011, after winter storms swept over the site, a bottle of wine was found 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.

Partygoers may have toasted the success of the discovery, but not with the uncorked bottle.