Bizarre

BIZARRE

Ocean Fathoms Ages its Wine in Nature’s Perfect Cellar: on the Ocean Floor in Santa Barbara Channel

By: LINDSEY GLASGOW

SANTA BARBARA— It started with a shipwreck in the Baltic Sea that left 168 bottles of French champagne at the bottom of the ocean for 170 years. The sunken trade schooner was discovered off the coast of Finland in 2010 and scattered amongst the wreckage 160-feet below the surface, were the bottles of bubbly. The tops were popped and experts who tasted the contents said the champagne preserved its taste even after decades thanks to near-perfect wine aging conditions found at the bottom of the Baltic Sea - a stable temperature of 35-40 degrees Fahrenheit, relatively low salinity, low levels of light, and high pressure. The discovery inspired and gave rise to a unique and uncommon wine aging method that uses the seafloor as cellar. After the shipwreck was discovered, several wineries, including Veuve Clicquot, began small experiments with aging wine in the ocean to see how the wine compares to the same wines aged in cellars.

After trying and failing to get his hands on an ocean-aged wine, Emanuele Azzeretto, who grew up in Italy making wine with his family, decided to make his own, marking the beginning of Ocean Fathoms.

“I’ve been a diver since I was a little kid so I wanted to drink some. Tried to buy it, tried to look for it, nobody could get it, they couldn’t give it to me,” said Azzeretto. “…So that’s how it started, because no one wanted to sell it to me.”

Santa Barbara-based Ocean Fathoms is a producer of ocean-aged wine, producing several proprietary blends of their own as well as collaborating with wineries around the world to age other wines with their unique process. All the wines are lowered to the ocean floor just about

Fab Fernandez photo Each wine bottle Ocean Fathoms ages is unique, collecting barnacles, coral, seashells, worm trails and other souvenirs during its 12-month stay below the surface.

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