On April 30, 2024, online users began virally sharing a video on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and X, with a rumor claiming the clip showed a bottle of wine recovered from the wreckage of the Titanic selling for $1.4 million at auction.
The video showed a man wearing a suit jacket carefully opening a bottle of wine visibly covered in what looked to be marine organisms. Other clips showed crates of wine purportedly also recovered from the ill-fated voyage of Titanic, which struck an iceberg on April 14, 1912, and sank hours later in the early hours of the following morning, leading to the deaths of around 1,500 passengers and crew.
One of the most popular postings of the video received nearly 7 million views. TikTok user @momentsgang posted the clip on May 1. The on-screen caption read, "Original Sealed Bottle of Wine Retrieved from the Titanic Sold for $1.4M at Auction." Snopes has yet to confirm the true originator of the video.
"A sealed bottle of wine recovered from the Titanic has sold for a record-breaking $1.4 million at auction," the TikTok user claimed in the text caption alongside the video. "The Oceanic Reserve Champagne, produced by the 'Maritime Vineyards,' is one of few intact bottles salvaged from the wreck, making it a highly sought-after piece of history. The sale underscores the enduring fascination with the Titanic disaster and the value placed on preserving its memory."
Snopes has rated this rumor "Miscaptioned." The video was genuine and did not appear doctored but also did not show a bottle of wine recovered from Titanic selling at an auction for $1.4 million. We found no news articles describing any such auctions. Further, a Google search for "Oceanic Reserve Champagne" and "Maritime Vineyards" produced zero helpful results — indicating these were not genuine product or company names.
Finding Answers
Our extensive online search for the origins of the video — including performing reverse-image searches for various frames in the clip — initially produced no helpful answers. Then, we spotted a link in Google search results leading us to the truth.
The banner behind the man in the viral video matched the design of a bottle of SSN01 Classic from the award-winning Seafloor Storage No.1 wine company in Yantai, China. According to seafloorstoragewine.net, the wine-making process includes "six months of oak aging followed by 12 months of undersea storage" at an ocean depth of 18 meters (59 feet). The website also mentioned that Golden Times Winery supplies the grapes for the wine and limits annual production to 50,000 bottles. We reached out to the company via its contact form on the website but did not yet receive a response.
A comparison of the banner behind the unidentified man opening wine in the video next to the website for the Seafloor Storage No. 1 wine company.
We have so far been unable to locate the names of the people who appeared in the video, nor were we able to find when and where the event depicted occurred. The Seafloor Storage No.1 wine company's website features only two blog articles from 2019 and 2020, both describing a China SeaFloor Storage Wine Culture Festival.
Champagne Bottles Found at Titanic Wreckage
Aside from the rumor about the video, ocean explorers truly discovered champagne bottles with corks intact at the final resting site of Titanic, according to a 1994 article published by the British newspaper Evening Sentinel.
A genuine, still-sealed bottle of champagne photographed in 2006 at "Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition." (Photo by Frank Mullen/WireImage)
French scientist Jean-Louis Michel and Marine geologist Robert Ballard led the joint French-American expedition that discovered the wreckage in 1985. The remains of the Titanic were found about 350 miles from Newfoundland and around 12,500 feet deep in the North Atlantic.
On July 19, 1986, UPI reported, "Ballard said the minisub's three-man crew discovered other artifacts, including champagne bottles that were being readied for a toast when an iceberg tore a hole in the Titanic."
Additional Information
For further reading about the Chinese wine company, we recommend an article from the Chinese-language website cnmjz.com and two stories from min.news.
In 2018, BusinessWorld published an unproven rumor about "a rich Asian collector" purportedly once buying six bottles of champagne recovered from the Titanic wreckage.
On Sept. 19, 1985 — just after the joint expedition to the wreckage of the Titanic — Chicago Tribune reported an article that provided some details and perspective about the wine and champagne bottles that were on the ship when it sank.
Note: Translations with Google Translate sometimes produce errors. Some websites also referred to the Chinese-made wine as "Haizang No. 1" from the "Yantai Age Wine Co., Ltd."