Tenerife is home to a niche winemaking method where bottles are aged 18m beneath the Atlantic Ocean. Dayna Camilleri Clarke goes in search of the world’s most extreme wine cellar
I’ve tasted wine in a lot of unlikely places, but never one that had commuted to the tasting via the seabed. Bodegas Monje sits in El Sauzal, on Tenerife’s north coast, with Mount Teide looming behind it in all its volcanic glory, and vines spilling down towards the Atlantic in front. It is, without exaggeration, one of the prettiest places I’ve been handed a wine list. But the knockout view isn’t really why people make the drive up here. They come for the bottle that spent five months living on the ocean floor.
My first reaction, if I’m real about it, was mild suspicion. Underwater ageing has the whiff of a marketing department’s fever dream; divers, barnacle-encrusted bottles and moody underwater footage surely look fabulous on the Instagram grid. But the more I dug (or should I say dived) into it before my visit, the more it turned out to be a genuine, if young, corner of winemaking. Tenerife, it seems, is a comparatively late arrival to a trend that started, rather romantically, with a shipwreck.
In 2009, Italian winemaker Piero Lugano of Bisson sank thousands of bottles of his Abissi sparkling wine off the coast of Portofino, inspired by tales of ancient wines pulled intact from sunken ships. Since then, wineries from the Basque Country to the British Virgin Islands have followed him down, each convinced that the sea does something to wine that a cellar simply can’t. Some argue it’s the currents. Others point to the near-total darkness or the gentle, constant motion of the water.
Bodegas Monje’s version is Tradicional Submarino, a red made from local grapes grown in volcanic soil and lowered 18m into the Atlantic for five to six months, then hauled back up, uncorked and compared, bottle for bottle, against the same wine that never left the bodega. That comparison is the entire point of the two-hour tasting: not just “try the sea wine”, but taste both, side by side, and decide for yourself whether the ocean earned its keep.
The difference wasn’t subtle. The land-aged wine was more or less what I’d expected. Dark fruit came first, followed by a firm grip of tannin. Dependable stuff. You could order a glass without giving the wine list another thought.
The bottle that had been for a swim was unmistakably its sibling, but someone had sanded off the corners. It was softer for a start. The fruit seemed to have relaxed its shoulders. Right at the finish came a faint saline edge, although I couldn’t quite decide whether it was really there or simply what I’d been primed to taste.
My tasting companion beat me to the word for it: silkier. Irritating, mostly because I’d been circling that exact adjective myself, and he got there first.
Is that the Atlantic sea talking, or is it just suggestion doing the heavy lifting? I put the question to Associate Professor Angela Zinnai, a renowned food technologist at the University of Pisa who has spent years studying underwater wine ageing as part of a multidisciplinary research group. She’s been studying the relationship between wine and the sea since 2018, using chemical analysis and, crucially, tasting to work out whether the differences can actually be detected in the glass.
The short version, as she explained it to me, is that a submerged bottle is effectively “isolated” from its surroundings, almost like a submarine. What happens next depends on the wine itself and the conditions inside and outside the bottle. The amount of oxygen trapped inside matters, as does the cyclical change in seawater temperature, which behaves differently from the air in a conventional cellar.
Her research suggests the difference isn’t confined to a laboratory report; you can actually taste it. Underwater ageing can change the wine’s structure more quickly, giving it greater fullness, while protecting it from oxidation, which helps preserve more of its aromas. Zinnai puts it rather more beautifully: done properly, the result can be “soft as velvet, deep as the night”.
There is a catch, though. Different wines need different conditions to reach their full potential, and Zinnai says the growing popularity of underwater ageing has led to a tendency to “submerge almost any wine under almost any conditions” without first understanding how that particular wine will behave. For her, this process is “far more than a passing trend”, but only when the science behind each bottle is properly understood.
That, at least, gave me something to hang my tasting notes on. Whatever was happening in that bottle at 18m, Monje seems to have put some thought into it, and the difference between the two glasses in front of me wasn’t subtle enough to be entirely wishful thinking.
Out on Monje’s terrace, firmly on dry land, Teide is doing its brooding-volcano thing in the distance. Both wines get another pour before I leave. It’s one last chance to decide whether the Atlantic really did anything at all. At about $32 for two hours, a real comparison, and a story you’ll dine out on for months, it’s hard to call it bad value, barnacles and all.
So, is underwater ageing serious winemaking innovation or an expensive splash of theatre? Researchers like Zinnai are still working out which wines respond best, under what conditions and for how long, so the jury is still somewhere beneath the surface. What I can say is that, tasted side by side, I preferred the bottle that had spent months under the sea. It was softer, rounder and, to my palate at least, simply the better glass. But for now, the wine can keep the wetsuit. I’ll take the glass.
The writer travelled at their own expense.