Earlier this summer, the wine industry took its eyes off vineyards to witness a storm brewing out at sea: Ocean Fathoms, a Santa Barbara-based wine company known for aging bottles in the Pacific Ocean, had 2,000 bottles of its wines confiscated and destroyed by the Santa Barbara District Attorney’s office. Its two founders, in alignment with their plea deal following charges alleging investor fraud and operating without the licensing and permits necessary to submerge the bottles, were required to pay $50,000 in restitution.
Ocean Fathoms, though, is far from the only company to cash in on ocean aging. This practice of aging bottles underwater in marine environments around the world has picked up speed over the last decade — and the resulting wines aren’t cheap. The bottles submerged by Ocean Fathoms were retailing for around $500 post-submersion, while the same wine sourced from its producers sold for less than $150. The company also held comparative tastings that booked for upwards of $1,000.
For those trying to make the case of sea aging, it’s all about harnessing the consistent temperature, pressure, and turning of the bottles happening beneath the waves to preserve and age superior wine. And with a near or complete absence of light at deep levels, on paper, the ocean appears to be the ultimate nature-made wine cellar. Even if this reasoning was sound — more on that later — the bottles are still at the mercy of mother nature, meaning they could break, blow, or simply taste no different than bottles aged on land, making it a challenging task to justify those massive price hikes. And while the vast majority of the companies employing the experimental technique do have express permission from the necessary government agencies to operate in their respective bodies of water, how strong is the case for dunking Champagne into the depths at all?
From shipwrecks to sinking rosé
While the trend of ocean aging is catching on, the concept’s roots can be found on the ocean floor inside shipwrecks, many of which went down in the 20th century. When these ships are located by divers decades after they sailed the seas, they’re sometimes found with crates of wine aboard. When tasted, many of the well-preserved bottles have been discovered to have aged near-perfectly. With low median temperatures, decreased or total obscured visibility, and no oxygen, these deep-sea conditions were the ideal inspiration for 21st-century producers to experiment with variable aging experiences. The logic behind these experiments argues that these conditions — along with the depths’ higher pressure and the constant undulation the ever-changing tides bring — have the ability to preserve the freshness of wine bottles’ contents, producing aged wines with more robust fruit notes and less aggressive acidity compared to those aged on land.
Producers that have taken the plunge have included Gaia Wines in Santorini where bottles of “Thalassitis” were dipped into the Mediterranean; Louis Roederer, which dropped bottles of Champagne into the Bay of Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy; and Bodega Crusoe Treasure in Plentzia, Spain, along with Ocean Fathoms and France’s Maison Veuve Clicquot.
But the ocean remains an extreme environment that’s home to several protected species, making the orchestration of these aging methods incredibly complex and demanding of proper approval.
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