The bottle lands on the table with a thud, looking like something excavated from Davy Jones’s Locker. I suppose that’s because it has been. Covered in an interlocking patchwork of barnacles and looking a little worse for wear, this bottle of chardonnay has recently been reclaimed from the ocean after a year of ageing underwater. The nose is intensely saline, and the palate is soft; brightly acidic with a hint of oak and the tiniest whiff of salt. I’m not sure I’ve ever drunk anything like it.
This first experience drinking a wine aged under the ocean was at Monika’s Wine Bar in Split, Croatia in 2021. The producer, Croatian firm Coral Sea Wines, began ageing wines underwater almost by accident. Owner Marko Dušević initially started his company farming mussels, growing the bivalve mollusc and then smoking and marinating them and selling them around the world. Naturally, working in the food world, he had friends in the wine industry. In 2013, one of those friends was visiting his farm and left behind a few bottles of wine. Rather than transport them all back to his home in Zadar, Dušević decided to submerge them in the sea to see what happened. Fast forward over a decade, and they have become the largest underwater wine cellar in the world and a leader in the movement towards ageing wines underwater. However, the industry is slowly catching up to them. And not always intentionally or by choice, either.
A bottle of the sparkling wine with a meal
A bottle of 2014 Vinho Millésime do Atlântico
In 2010, a group of divers stumbled upon a shipwreck off the coast of Finland. Inside it, they found 168 bottles of champagne – including many from Veuve Clicquot – that had been quietly ageing away at 160 feet for 170 years. Incredibly, most of the bottles had managed to remain unspoiled, like little liquid time capsules into viticulture almost two centuries past. Most bottles were seized by the government – ostensibly for safekeeping but possibly for one riotous, historical party – but a lucky few key wine experts were given the chance to taste some of the bottles. What they were most struck by was how well the wine had kept in its watery cellar. At a low temperature, with little to no light and constant movement thanks to ocean currents, it seemed the bottles had aged under perfect conditions.
The discovery of the bottles opened up a whole new submarine world for winemakers. Experiments with ageing bottles underwater became more commonplace across the globe. In London, in 2023, Gordon Ramsay Restaurant Group’s Restaurant 1890 launched a groundbreaking new wine accompaniment to its nine-course tasting menu – guests could opt for a pairing consisting entirely of wines aged underwater by the restaurant.
Bottles of wine emerging from the sea
The initiative was pioneered by Emanuel Pesqueira, former head of wine for Restaurant 1890. Initially partnering with Brejinho da Costa vineyard, the restaurant took a series of bottles and stuck them in the Bay of Sines in Portugal to age for anywhere from six to 24 months. Pesqueira would fly out and dive for the bottles himself, regularly tasting them as the wine matured. While he is no longer with the restaurant, the incoming head of wine, Fábio Monteiro, has taken over the project.
You may – as I initially did – assume that this time in the ocean would give the wine something of a briny character. It would, in many ways, make sense as a desired additional flavour profile, offering chefs an added depth and gastronomic note to partner with food. Instead, over the course of a tasting with Monteiro, I discover that this aquatic viticultural odyssey is about so much more than just salt.
This aquatic viticultural odyssey is about so much more than just salt
The wines are delicate, high acidity, somehow robust in a way that only comes with age, while retaining a freshness generally synonymous with youth. A blend of arinto and antao vaz, which if left above ground perhaps may have developed a kind of golden weight, instead is bracing with notes of green apple, zippy, round and bright. The gewürztraminer, meanwhile, is honeyed on the nose but bafflingly lacking any residual sweetness on the palate. But it’s the one red wine – a blend of touriga franca, nacional, tinto roriz and trincadeira – that is truly astounding. It’s clear the wine has age on it – the flavours have mellowed, with a thick, tannic finish – but this robust body is tempered by a vibrant, unripe cherry acidity. It’s as if it has taken itself down to Harley Street to smooth out its fine lines; like botox for wine.
Wine presentation at Restaurant 1890
Bottles delivered to the table at Restaurant 1890
“We have very fresh flavour profiles on our food,” Monteiro tells me after our tasting. “So that’s why underwater wine works so well – it gives us freshness, salinity, and acidity, which works very well with the food that chef James Sharp prepares.” Balance in wine can be hard to strike, and tends to involve a unique combination of grape varietal, soil and weather. As a general rule, the warmer the climate, the more sugar develops in the grapes, and the sweeter the wine. So, as our planet continues to heat up, it can be harder for winemakers to give their juice the right amount of acidity. As my tasting with Monteiro shows, this time underwater seems to Benjamin Button some of these wines, slowing down the ageing process in a way that helps them develop the character of an aged wine, while retaining – or even promoting – the desired acidity.
“The problem now with climate change is that it makes the producers pick the grapes earlier,” says Monteiro. “Sometimes with less perfect conditions, so they might be on the limit of being too sweet, or they’ll have too much sugar to produce the wine they want. If they pick later than they should for whatever reason, then ageing the wines underwater could be something that they would use to slow down the process and balance the flavour profiles more.”
Bottles of Coral Wine
For Coral Sea Wines, however, general manager Domagoj Skuliber says that maturing the wines underwater actually “expedites the ageing process”, giving wines “more aged and ‘secondary and tertiary’ aroma profile notes, rather than ‘primary’ aromas.” His comments align with what I noticed from my tasting with Monteiro at Restaurant 1890 – while the wines retained a youthful acidity, they all had a robust depth of flavour that a younger wine usually lacks. What Skuliber emphasises, however, is that this time underwater markedly improves the structure and flavour profile of the wines. “This is not just a matter of opinion, but a matter of fact,” he tells me. “Every wine goes to a laboratory analysis prior to placement on the market. Upon comparing the same wines – one of which has been aged under the sea – there is a clear difference in the taste and flavour profile.” According to him, the wine aged under the sea wins out every time.
He should know, too. Coral Sea Wine had six years of testing and development before launching on the market, with over 10,000 bottles being destroyed in their pursuit of the perfect underwater wine. Testing everything from grape varietals to depth and location, they quickly learned what did and did not work. “It’s not just about the grape – not all wines are able to endure the ageing process. Generally, wines without a firm structure or enough acidity fall apart in the sea,” Skuliber tells me. “Studies have shown that the location is of the utmost importance, too. The purity of the sea and the amount of sea current are crucial to the operation. Also, there are certain depths that work with wine, meaning that you need to have a large body of the sea with a similar depth.”
The purity of the sea and the amount of sea current are crucial to the operation
There are, of course, limitations faced by the process. As the length and scale of Coral Sea Wine’s experiments imply, some grape varietals just don’t take well to time underwater. Whether the salt water upends the liquid’s equilibrium, or the pressure and movement simply unsettle the wine, there are some bottles that don’t like to be aged underwater. Monteiro tells me that, generally, wines aged in stainless steel will pick up on saline flavour profiles more so than those aged in oak – something that can impact the desired outcome.
Pulling the wine cage out of the sea
Space underwater doesn’t come for free, either. The area where the wine is aged needs to be leased, and understandably somewhere where the seabed isn’t disrupted by fishing or other recreational activities. Nevertheless, the practice seems to be cropping up more and more, everywhere from the English Channel, where Champagne Drappier and Exton Park have started putting bottles to bed; to Greece, where Gaia is trialling ageing its assyrtiko underwater; and even the Arctic Ocean, where bottles of Rathfinny sparkling wine have been aged for Norwegian cruise company Hurtigruten.
In an industry historically change-averse, the relatively quick uptake of the practice of ageing wine underwater is both encouraging and, on a larger level, possibly indicative of an industry realising that it has no option but to adapt if it wants to survive. As climate change wrecks ever-increasing havoc on wine at every level, winemakers are evidently realising that the ocean could provide a solution to some of their problems. In the meantime, if my tasting at Restaurant 1890 is anything to go off, to paraphrase everyone’s favourite cartoon crab from The Little Mermaid, wine may just be better down where it’s wetter.
