Nellie Ming Lee

The Corkscrew | An underwater winery? Champagne house hits the spot with ocean-aged wine

Immersing bottles in the sea can be an eco-friendly way to age wines

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Bottles of wine, primarily French bordeaux, litter the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean near the remains of the luxury liner Titanic, more than 12,000 feet below the surface. Picture: Alamy

Nellie Ming Lee

Published: 12:45pm, 26 Aug 2018Updated: 2:55pm, 26 Aug 2018

Submerging bottles of wine in the ocean to age them may seem unusualbut, given that it has proved to be an effective technique, one might wonder why it isn’t used more often.

Away from the shore and shallow water, the ocean is quite temperate, even in tropical seas.

Shipwrecks – most famously the Titanic – are often found to contain bottles of wine that survived the sinking. In 2010, a wreck discovered at a depth of 50 metres in the Baltic Sea, just off the Åland Islands, in Finland, yielded 168 bottles of champagne. The bottles were more than 170 years old and a close inspection of the corks (most of the labels had long since eroded) showed that the wines were from the houses of Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, Heidsieck and Juglar. Incredibly, the contents were still drinkable, the depth having provided the wine with the perfect, constant low temperature.

Michel Drappier in his vineyards in the Urville region of Champagne, France. Picture: AFP

Inspired to try new ways of ageing wines, Michel Drappier, of Champagne Drappier, first experimented in the Alps. This proved unsuccessful because high altitude sped up the ageing process, raising the pressure inside the bottle higher than the surrounding environment, resulting in fewer bubbles in the champagne.

Drappier deduced that the ideal depth under the sea would be where the water pressure was equal to the pressure inside the bottle (five to six atmospheres) as there would be no stress on the cork and contents. He found the perfect spot in St Malo bay, in Brittany, France, about 30 metres down, where there is no sunlight and the water has a median temperature of 10 degrees Celsius – the same as his cellars in Champagne.