After a team of divers salvaged 168 bottles of champagne from a shipwreck at the bottom of the Baltic Sea in 2010, scientists began a series of tests to determine what was exactly in the bottles, how old they were and how the taste compared to today’s champagne’s.

According to a April 20 Sci-Tech Today report, scientists found that the champagne was around 170 years old, but also that the 19th century champagne was a whole lot like the stuff we drink today.

“We were thinking the chemical composition of this wine would be very different from the composition of wines today,” said Philippe Jeandet, a professor at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne in France. “But that was wrong. We have found that the wines were very similar.”

Jeandet and colleagues from several institutions published the results of their analysis April 20 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. They compared the chemistry of three samples from the shipwrecked champagne, which is believed to have been produced around 1840 or 1841, with three samples of modern Veuve Clicquot from 1955, 1980 and 2011.

Sci-Tech Today reported that the team didn’t know much about the sunken ship, including where it sailed from, where it was headed or when it sank off the coast of Finland. That made figuring out the age and origin of the champagne, which had lost its labels, challenging at first. But later inspections of branded engravings on the corks revealed that the champagne came from the Veuve Cliquot Ponsardin, Heidsieck and Juglar (later known as Jacquesson) houses.

The chemical differences the scientists found between the old and young champagnes pointed toward changes in the winemaking process — and in champagne drinkers’ tastes — over the last two centuries. The finished, bottled product fished out of the Baltic had a much higher sugar content than today’s wine: about 150 grams per liter, versus the 6-8 grams per liter in modern brut.