Heidsieck & Co "Monopole" is a champagne house located in the Champagne region of France. It was founded in 1785 by Florens-Louis Heidsieck. Today, Heidsieck is owned by the Vranken company (located in Épernay), who also have Pommery and Demoiselle in their portfolio. The champagne has a lot of pinot noir in the standard cuvée which makes it a little bit heavier in its style.
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In 1998, the Hiedsieck cuvée called Diamant bleu vintage 1907 was found in the shipwreck of the Swedish freighter Jönköping in the Gulf of Finland, the ship was charted to deliver spirits, via neutral Sweden, to the Imperial Court of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. The ship was torpedoed in 1916 by a German sub during World War I and a majority of the bottles survived in the frigid waters.[1] About 2000 bottles were salvaged from the ship and have been sold at auctions all over the world as a historic novelty.
In July 2010, a group of Swedish divers found 168 bottles from the 1830s aboard a shipwreck in the Baltic Sea off the coast of the Åland Islands.[2][3][4] The bottles were initially claimed to have been produced between 1782 and 1788. They were sent back to France for analysis. Shortly after this the bottles were traced to a now-defunct champagne house Juglar. In November 2010 it was reported that the wreck included Veuve Clicquot bottles as well.[5][6] Veuve Clicquot stated that experts checking branding of the corks "were able to identify with absolute certainty" that three of the bottles were theirs. The other bottles examined were attributed to Juglar.[6]
On November 17 the local government of the Åland Islands announced that most of the bottles are to be auctioned off.[7]
In January 2011 further info about the Åland bottles was released. 95 of them were identified as Juglar, 46 as Veuve Clicquot and at least four as Heidsieck[8].