"Excellent bouquet, hints of tobacco and leather, quite fresh and young, but the great length - rather sweet for most tastes". Not quite Jilly Goolden style analysis, but that of a professor of food ingredients at Reims University on tasting two drops of a bottle of Veuve Cliquot which was 170 years old.
Discovered in a wreck 50 metres below the Baltic sea 5 years ago some of the 160 bottles were analysed to see how they were made and if they had remained drinkable. This was the oldest champagne tasted and it seems that it had survived pretty well. The analysis suggested that the chemical composition was much as it would be today, but with three times the sugar that a modern demi-sec would have. The move to brut as the champagne of choice was started in England and the United States at the start of the 20th century. Cheers.
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