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Wicker Covered Wine Bottle, SS Central America Treasure [160802]

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles / Bottles & Insulators Start Price:200.00 USD Estimated At:400.00 - 1,000.00 USD
Wicker Covered Wine Bottle, SS Central America Treasure [160802]
SOLD
2,200.00USD+ (440.00) buyer's premium + applicable fees & taxes.
This item SOLD at 2023 Mar 04 @ 16:42UTC-8 : PST/AKDT
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A fantastic small green German Riesling wine bottle with applied top, wrapped in a nearly perfect wicker outer. 8.5x2.5." No apparent chips or cracks. Recovered in 2014 from the portside debris field. Could this be an Addie Easton bottle?


Addie Easton carried wine on board and shared with passengers as the ship was sinking. On page 54 of America's Lost Treasure by Tommy Thompson there is a picture of a similar bottle without the wicker: "Addie Easton shared bottle of wedding-gift wine with the exhausted passengers and crew as they worked to save the ship. Perhaps this was one of her bottles." On page 52 of Thompson: "At about 11:00 at night, Addie remembered the wedding gifts of crackers and wine she and Ansel has brought aboard. She distributed them to the men at their posts, promoting grateful passengers to later describe her as 'a true angel of mercy.'"

Probably 375ml or smaller size, these size bottles are 100 times rarer than a full size German wine bottle. Green glass in a German wine bottle points to the Rhine or Mosel regions. Very sweet Riesling wines are rich and often consumed in small quantities as they are very satisfying and intense. The richest and most rare German Rieslings are classified as Trockenbeerenauslese and abbreviated TBA as it is much easier to pronounce! Among modern German wines, TBA's are by far the most expensive and rarest dessert wines, only made in the vintages where Mother Nature cooperates to achieve the proper grape ripeness, and in tiny quantities. We are fairly certain this was a bottle once filled with TBA, but it is empty now.

Riesling was being produced in the Mosel in 1435, and the region fully embraced the grape in the 17th Century. By the 18th Century, the wines, with a reputation for high quality, were even exported to England to be enjoyed by nobility. By the 19th Century, the Mosel Valley and its wine production was under Prussian rule and ideal weather conditions was helping produce Rieslings of particularly high quality. (wine-searcher.com.)

Provenance: SS Central America Collection