When you think of ageing wines you probably think of rotund oak barrels sitting amongst the rolling foothills of Franschhoek and Stellenbosch, a region famed for its wine and the students with an insatiable appetite for it.

What you wouldn’t think of is burying it in the ocean bed at a depth of 40 metres, letting it sit there for around 18 months before hauling it back up to sample the goodies. This is the task of a Frenchman from the Saint-Mandrier peninsula, a certain Jérôme Vincent, who heads the National School of Divers (ENS in French).

So just how are they storing the tipple at the bottom of the sea? Over to VICE:

“Divers are the only ones with the skills to carry out underwater work,” explains Vincent. In this particular case, a serious construction project is at hand: digging deep into the Mediterranean by building an aquatic cave, dropping the bottles in and covering them layer by layer with sediment…

Fifteen different winemakers are participating in the operation, which includes the 2011 vintage red and the 2014 batch of white and rosé, totalling 240 bottles.

So what do they really hope to achieve by this rather arduous task? It turns out that wine, when submerged underwater, benefits from optimal conditions that are believed to improve its quality. These conditions include a constant pressure and temperature in complete darkness. Here’s one of the project’s more interested participants:

On deck, Pascal Périer, director of the Oenothèque of Bandol Wines, watches as the wine hive disappears underwater. If the experiment is successful and the wine that resurfaces turns out better than the ones aged in a cave, the winemaker will score great press around the potential to age rosé wines. “People don’t always think about aging them. I’ve tasted Bandol rosés that were aged more than 20 years and were absolutely staggering.”

Now we must wait out the 18 months before we can know whether the project was a success, but not everyone is keen to sit around and twiddle their thumbs in the mean time. Closer to home (and available right now) are some of the finest wines in the world, the likes of Franschhoek’s Haute Cabrière satisfying the thirst of many around this office.

They may not bury their wines at the bottom of the ocean but they’ll do us just fine and, for the fans of the bubbly nectar, don’t forget we have a cracking special on a case of the Pierre Jourdan Cuvee Brut HERE.

[source:vice]