A Monday morning chortle is always welcome and today’s comes courtesy of a press release from the Bermuda Tourist Authority.

Divers recently pulled a 150-year-old bottle of wine from a Civil War era shipwreck off the coast of Bermuda.

The bottle was one of five which were recovered intact from the wreck of the Mary Celestia.

Last week, it was opened and sampled by a panel of experts at a food and drink festival in Charleston, South Carolina to commemorate 150 years since the end of the US Civil War.

150-year-old wine

The results were memorable. For all the wrong reasons.

The tasting notes on wine lists sometimes owe a debt to the sommelier’s creative writing skills but the experts on this tasting panel didn’t mince their words.

Grey in colour, the wine is said to have tasted of a ‘combination of crab water, gasoline, salt water and vinegar with hints of citrus and alcohol’.

Demonstrating a firm grasp of understatement, master sommelier Paul Roberts commented ‘I’ve had shipwreck wines before, they can be great. This one, obviously, was not’.

Room-clearing nose

The wine was analysed prior to the uncorking through cork samples by wine chemist Pierre Louis Teissedre of the University of Bordeaux.  It was found to be 37 percent alcohol, with the nose of the wine said to be a room-clearing mix of camphor, stagnant water, hydrocarbons, turpentine and sulphur.

In 1864, the Mary Celestia was loaded with supplies for the Confederate States when it struck a reef off the coast of Bermuda and sank into the Atlantic Ocean in just six minutes. It has long been debated whether the sinking was deliberate or accidental.

Secret locker

The wine was found by brothers Philippe and Jean-Pierre Rouja, who were diving the shipwreck in 2011 after winter storms revealed a secret boatswain’s locker in the bow of the ship.

Subsequent dives found additional bottles of wine, sealed bottles of perfume, women’s shoes, hairbrushes and pearl shell buttons at the shipwreck.

The Mary Celestia’s wine doesn’t sound at all tempting. Lots of 5pm restaurants have rather more appealing bins on their lists.

You could have a lot of fun exploring the wines at the Hotel du Vin restaurants in Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews.

The wine list at Brian Maule at Chardon D’Or in Glasgow has some rare and old wines alongside more every day quaffing choices while the Californian wine list at Edinburgh’s Calistoga is always full of surprises.