Seasoned for Destination?

[taiwan_girl]

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.

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.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/two-winemakers-aged-wine-sea-191516274.html

[Mik]

Having a wine cellar, it’s more fun to just hold them and let them age naturally, tasting a bottle from the case every year or two.