MoxVib

Deep-sea divers happened upon a shipwreck on the Baltic Sea floor in 2010 and, from the wreckage, recovered 168 bottles of 170-year-old champagne. According to scientists, they had “aged in close-to-perfect conditions at the bottom of the sea.”

Emanuele Azzaretto spent years hunting for one of those bottles to taste what the sea had created, Santa Barbara Magazine reported in 2020. When he failed, Azzaretto decided to replicate those conditions as best he could by plunging bottles of wine into the Pacific Ocean, letting them sit there for a year and pulling them back up to drink.

That led him and Todd Hahn to create a business out of the “underwater aging” of wines.

But their business was a crime, according to California authorities.

Last week, prosecutors in Santa Barbara County announced they had reached a plea agreement with Azzaretto and Hahn, co-founders of Ocean Fathoms, regarding their “illegal underwater wine aging and sales operation.” As part of the agreement, the pair pleaded guilty to three misdemeanors: illegally discharging material into U.S. waters, selling alcohol without a license, and aiding and abetting investor fraud.

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Azzaretto and Hahn also forfeited some 2,000 bottles of wine and other alcohol. Authorities disposed of the booze at a wastewater treatment plant before recycling the bottles.

“The defendants operated with complete disregard for laws designed to protect our coastline from harm,” said Santa Barbara County District Attorney John Savrnoch. “In fact, nearly every aspect of their business was conducted in violation of state or federal law.”

Ocean Fathoms, Azzaretto and Hahn did not respond to requests for comment from The Washington Post.

170-year-old, shipwrecked champagne gets a taste test

As early as 2017, Azzaretto and Hahn started depositing metal cages of wine on the ocean floor about a mile off the “environmentally sensitive” Santa Barbara coast, prosecutors said in a news release. They left them on the seafloor for a year, long enough for the reef’s ecosystem to grow on the bottles, prosecutors said. After a year, they allegedly pulled up the crates and sold the wine for as much as $500 a bottle. According to Santa Barbara Magazine article, they put the bottles at depths of more than 70 feet to keep the corks in place and maintain pressurization.

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Azzaretto and Hahn did so without obtaining the required permits from the California Coastal Commission or the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, prosecutors said.

When combined with salt water, the metals Azzaretto and Hahn used to build the cages created an “underwater battery” that discharged electricity through the water and the bottles of wine, according to the Ocean Fathoms website. They claimed that the ionization broke down tannins, a sediment of mostly grape skins, creating a smoother wine much faster than if the bottles had been aged in a cellar.

On its website, Ocean Fathoms describes the process as “a beatifically symbiotic relationship with the ocean.”

In 2021, the state coastal commission found out about Ocean Fathoms’s underwater aging project and sent Azzaretto a letter ordering him to remove all of his wine from the ocean. The commission eventually forwarded the case to the Santa Barbara County District Attorney’s Office, which charged Azzaretto and Hahn in December 2022.

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Andrew Waterhouse, a wine chemist and professor emeritus in the department of viticulture and enology at the University of California at Davis, does not see a need for underwater aging. He said while there are benefits to the technique — calm conditions, limited sunlight and consistent, low temperatures — winemakers can get those things with traditional wine cellars without incurring the cost of packing, transporting and depositing thousands of wine bottles on the ocean floor and then doing it all in reverse a year or so later.

In the end, the chemistry of the resultant wine is “not very different or not at all different,” Waterhouse said. But chemical composition isn’t everything, he added. In theory, someone could create a wine that’s chemically identical to one from a famous high-end vineyard, but it still wouldn’t have the same terroir — the entire natural environment that goes into making a wine, including soil, climate and topography.

Underwater aging makes the seafloor part of a wine’s terroir, part of its story, which appeals to some customers, Waterhouse said.

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“They are, in effect, buying it because (a) it’s going to taste good and (b) there’s an interesting story behind it,” he said.

Waterhouse said he plans to include underwater aging in a new chapter on alternative aging methods when he updates his book. The first instance he’s found of the technique is from 2009, when an Italian winemaker short on terrestrial storage space turned to a less conventional option.

That winemaker worked with Italian authorities to get approval.

Waterhouse has heard of other winemakers using the technique here and there in the 14 years since but not much. He doesn’t see it gaining much traction, mainly because it costs a lot relative to the value it adds to the wine.

Waterhouse was diplomatic in describing the benefits that winemakers like Azzaretto and Hahn ascribe to underwater aging.

“I would say,” he said, “a lot of this is inventive imagery.”

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