Don't Age Your Wine in the Ocean Unless You Like Notes of Crab Water

Note to budding winemakers: Don't age your wine in the cold, dead sea.

That's the message of the US federal government, at least. The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), working in conjunction with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), recently issued a warning that ocean-aged wines might very well be illegal.

Now, this is not exactly a widespread practice. In fact, only one US winery—Mira Winery in Napa Valley—has embarked on such a project to our knowledge. Still, the TTB is concerned about more than just crabs getting into your Merlot.

"Overpressure on bottle seals increases the likelihood of seepage of sea or ocean water into the product," the TTB writes in its advisory. "As a result, variation in overpressure during tidal flows and storms would allow the bottles to 'breathe,' or exchange contents of the bottle with the sea or ocean, as the bottle tries to equilibrate its internal pressure to the external sea pressure, and chemical and biological contaminants in ocean water may contaminate the wine."

That's not all that bad, is it? Who wouldn't want a top note of ocean breeze in their glass?

Well, along with that ocean breeze, water-aged wine could become contaminated with "gasoline, oil, heavy metals, plastics, drug residues, pesticides, as well as various types of filth, including waste materials from biological sources, sludge, decaying organic matter, runoff from farms, effluents from sewage treatment plants, and bilge waters from vessels," according to the TTB. (Pro tip: Bilge waters and sludge pair well a washed rind sheep's cheese.)

But again, this advisory so far applies to exactly one commercial winery, which never planned to sell the wine in the first place. Last fall, Mira placed 48 wax-sealed bottles of its 2009 Cabernet Sauvignon in steel cages and lowered them 60 feet below the suface of the temperate waters of South Carolina's Charleston Harbor. There, they would ostensibly age and take on a new, ocean-like terroir, leading Mira to dub the project "Aquaoir."

Things appeared to be going swimmingly back in December, when The Telegraph caught up with the progress of Aqauoir: "After a few months of ocean ageing, the wine had a markedly different taste to the same wine which had been aged in their cellars. Ocean conditions also seemed to have expedited the ageing process." Mira could not, however, find any significant chemical difference between the wines that would account for the change in flavor.

That's still far, far better than 170-year-old bottle that was recently uncorked. The wine was discovered four years ago in the 1864 wreck of a Civil War blockade runner. When it was tasted earlier this month at a wine festival in South Carolina, the tasting panel noted that it "smelled and tasted like a mixture of crab water, gasoline, salt water and vinegar, with hints of citrus and alcohol." One sommelier went even further, detecting "pickles, diesel, naphtha, dead shellfish" while the wine was being decanted, and "citrus, camphor, stale fish tank, gasoline, seawater at low tide, and slightly herbal notes like Chartreuse" in the glass.

Maybe the TTB was on to something.