It all started on a very hot August afternoon with a dirty old Coca-Cola bottle, a builder called Vince, and what turned out to be a trail leading back to Apollinaris mineral water and a WWI wreck in the English Channel.
A Garden Table, a Cold Beer, and a Bottle
Vince is my builder here in rural Andalucía. His name is Vince Vaughan — the same as the American actor, a fact he was never slow to mention. Site meetings at Casa Adora tend to involve cold beers and a wide-ranging conversation about bricks, life, and everything in between. On this particular afternoon, an old excavated Coca-Cola bottle was sitting on the garden table — chipped, dirty, and not especially interesting — but it got us talking about the merits of bottled versus canned drinks. I prefer bottles. Vince, it's fair to say, is less particular.
In a previous life, Vince was part of an amateur diving team based in Devon. In the 1980s the team would dive and explore wrecks in the English Channel, occasionally retrieving an artefact or two. I won't speculate on what the Receiver of Wreck would have made of their methods, but over the years they collected bells, cannonballs, and — 6 miles south-west of Eddystone — several bottles from a wreck lying on the seabed.
When they surfaced, the corks imploded on all but one.
That one bottle was Vince's. It was sitting in front of me as we spoke.
The bottle — Apollinaris mineral water, c.1917. Recovered from the English Channel in the 1980s, cork intact. Still in Vince's possession.
The Bottle: Apollinaris Mineral Water, c.1917
The bottle contained mineral water, bottled in Germany. Vince thought the ship it came from was called the Dirigo — "it sounds Spanish to me," he said.
Dirigo is actually Latin for "I lead" — and it is the motto of the US state of Maine, which gives its name to the S.V. Dirigo, the first steel-hulled sailing ship built in the United States, launched in 1894. Despite being American, she was British-designed by J.F. Waddington of Liverpool, and the steel came from Motherwell in Scotland, supplied by David Colville & Sons.
S.V. Dirigo, built 1894 — the first steel sailing ship built in the United States. Sunk by German U-boat UB-23, 31 May 1917.
The mineral water itself was Apollinaris — a naturally sparkling water from Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler in the German Rhineland, first commercially bottled in 1852. By 1913, the Apollinaris company was producing 40 million bottles a year, exporting 90% of them worldwide. It was Otto von Bismarck's favourite mineral water. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire considered it so personally his that he once challenged a writer to a duel for mocking his preference.
The Sinking of the S.V. Dirigo
If you are wondering what a 19th century American sailing ship is doing 55 metres below sea level off the Plymouth coast, here is the short version.
On 31 May 1917, the S.V. Dirigo was stopped and sunk by German U-boat UB-23, commanded by Hans Ewald Niemer. There was one casualty.
It was not the Dirigo's first wartime encounter. In March 1916 she was arrested by a British patrol boat and escorted into Lerwick in the Shetland Islands, where her cargo of barley was confiscated on suspicion that it was destined to be transhipped to Germany via Sweden.
She survived that. She did not survive UB-23.
German U-boats similar to UB-23 — the submarine that sank S.V. Dirigo on 31 May 1917, 6 miles south-west of Eddystone.
Apollinaris Mineral Water and the Coca-Cola Connection
This is where the story takes an unexpected turn.
The Apollinaris spring and brand were eventually acquired by Coca-Cola in 2006, purchased from Cadbury-Schweppes for an undisclosed sum. At the time of writing the original version of this post in 2015, Apollinaris was still very much a going concern under the Coca-Cola umbrella.
It no longer is. Coca-Cola ended retail sales of Apollinaris in Germany in 2021 — quietly discontinuing a brand that had been bottled continuously since 1852, survived two World Wars, Nazi control during the 1930s and 40s, and over 150 years of export across the world.
A bottle of it once sat on a garden table in Andalucía, recovered from the English Channel, bottled the year the ship carrying it was sunk by a German U-boat.
Coca-Cola killed the brand without ceremony. One assumes without a duel.
A Note on Vince
Vince is still in Andalucía. He developed dementia some years after that afternoon and is now in a care home. The bottle, as far as I know, is still at his house — intact, corked, and approximately 108 years old.
Some things outlast everything.
Wonky photos, proper stories, genuine curiosity — read more from The Flexible Chef.
It was Hitler's drink of choice and for ten years the company was run by the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt Amtsgruppe W, which was the business side of the SS. Earlier they were court suppliers to Queen Victoria.