Does aging wine under water have benefits or is it going overboard?

The theory and practice of harnessing the ocean for food, energy, and profit has been with us for some thousand years now, but it’s only in the last half dozen that winemakers have turned in an industrial fashion toward it as an aquatic cellar.

The notion is that at something like 50 feet and below, the temperature is constant, the light is low, and the (relative) lack of available oxygen means that there’s no opportunity for oxygen to seep in change the subtle proceedings. Since the mid-Aughts, winemakers in Italy, South Africa, France, the U.S., and Australia, vintners have been sinking thousands of gallons of wine – red, white, sparkling, in bottles and in barrels – down in the deep with often splendid results.

A quick roundup, then, of who’s doing what:

Piero Lugano, a Ligurian Sea wine merchant/producer in Cinque Terre, Italy, ran out of space in 2009 to store his spumante harvest and decided to anchor it down 180 feet deep in the Portofino Marine Park near Genoa. He now puts 6,500 bottles down there annually, in giant steel cages marked ‘Abissi,’ for the depths for a year to 18 months at a time. He’s retailing them, with the original barnacle tracks across them, for about 70 per bottle.


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