Underwater Wine Cellar

If you’ve spent any amount of time touring vineyards, tasting wine or just talking about the best use for grapes, you’ve undoubtedly heard about how important terroir is. Turns out that “complete natural environment” that terroir refers to also extends to the way the wine is aged once it’s been bottled because the latest trend in European winemaking involves aging the wine underwater. Yes, you read that correctly. Edivo wine out of Croatia is bottling their wine, sealing it in clay amphoras and then letting it age for almost two years (over 700 days) under the Adriatic Sea at a depth of 18-25 meters. The end result is their wine Navis Mysterium–The Sea Mystery–that comes complete in the amphora exactly as it came out of the water complete with algae, seashells and all. According to an underwater aging experiment that Veuve Cliquot performed on some of their options, the conditions are more than a marketing gimmick because of the temperature controls, pressure, lack of oxygen and light.