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The Underwater Winery That Captivated the World’s Media: The Media Story of Crusoe Treasure

By AlexGMMar 30, 2026

Some projects are born to remain tucked away in a corner of the map. Others, through the sheer force of their originality, end up making headlines across five continents. Crusoe Treasure undoubtedly belongs in the latter category.

Since Borja Saracho and his partners founded the world’s first underwater winery and artificial reef in Plentzia Bay (Bizkaia), the story of their wines has crossed oceans of print and screen. Not as a passing curiosity, but as a story that leading international media have wanted to tell—and retell—year after year.

This article traces that media coverage: who has talked about Crusoe Treasure, when, and why it matters beyond brand ego.

An idea so radical that journalists couldn’t ignore it

Ageing wine 20 metres below the surface of the Cantabrian Sea, inside an artificial reef designed to host more than five hundred different marine species, is bound to attract attention. The premise itself is a story. And the best stories tell themselves—though it helps to have the courage to bring them to life.

The project officially began in 2007, with the Plentzia Underwater Beverage Ageing Laboratory (LSEB) serving as its testing ground. Over two and a half years, the founding team submerged wines from 27 different wineries and 14 distinct Designations of Origin to study how the ocean environment transformed their organoleptic and chemical characteristics. The results were consistent—and striking—enough to take the leap into commercial production.

Paradoxically, that scientific rigour is what has made Crusoe Treasure so appealing to the world’s most discerning media. It’s no marketing gimmick. It’s science applied to wine, with measurable results: constant pressure, temperatures fluctuating between 12 and 17 degrees, continuous water movement and an absence of light. According to analyses by the Excell Ibérica laboratory, these factors produce a chemical evolution in the wine that is genuinely different from what occurs in a conventional winery.

Associated Press: the catalyst for global coverage

The decisive breakthrough onto the international media scene came with an interview that the Associated Press conducted with Borja Saracho, published in June 2022. Journalist Cassandra Allwood wrote a piece that not only described the process of making underwater wines, but also captured the philosophy behind the project: the belief that the sea can improve wine, backed by years of systematic analysis.

The ripple effect was immediate. Associated Press has distribution agreements with thousands of media outlets around the world, and the story of Crusoe Treasure began appearing simultaneously in a wide range of places.

Europe:

Euronews published both a news report and an article in its digital edition, reaching audiences across the European Union.
Deutsche Welle (DW), Germany’s leading international public broadcaster, covered the story, highlighting what sets the brand apart.
Het Laatste Nieuws (HLN), the most popular newspaper in Belgium’s Flemish region, covered the story with particular attention to accounts from American wine tourists visiting the winery.

North America:

CBS produced its own feature on the winery, including comments from visitors experiencing underwater wine first-hand.
Central Oregon Daily and the magazine Inside Edition continued to follow the story from the United States.

Asia and the rest of the world:

WION, the Indian multinational English-language news network with audiences in dozens of countries, shared the story across its global network.
In China and Taiwan, coverage came through Yahoo! News, reaching millions of Chinese-language readers.
In Japan,, TV Asahi, one of the country’s leading television channels, featured Crusoe Treasure in its programming.
Cuba Comunica brought the story to Spanish-speaking audiences in the Caribbean.

In the words of Borja Saracho himself during that wave of coverage: “You might think we’re crazy, and that all of this is marketing. But after hundreds or thousands of analyses, we’ve seen that the different evolution of the chemical components has a positive effect on the wine’s expression.”

Before 2022: an already strong media presence

What happened in 2022 wasn’t the beginning. It was the culmination of credibility built up over many years. Crusoe Treasure has been the subject of leading editorial coverage for more than a decade.

Leading media outlets that have covered Crusoe Treasure over the years:

The Guardian (United Kingdom): one of the leading newspapers in the English-speaking world featured Crusoe Treasure in an article about wine tourism in the Basque Country.
El País Semanal: the Sunday supplement of Spain’s most influential newspaper published an extensive feature on the underwater winery in October 2018.
El Mundo: another of Spain’s major national newspapers took an interest in the underwater wine phenomenon and its international reach.
South China Morning Post (Hong Kong): one of Asia’s most respected English-language media outlets explored the growing niche of underwater wineries, with Crusoe Treasure as a leading example.
NBC Washington (United States): in June 2019, NBC’s Washington affiliate featured the winery in a segment titled “This Underwater Winery Gives ‘Seafood’ A Whole New Meaning”.
L'Expansion (France): the prestigious French business and economics magazine took note of Crusoe Treasure’s model as an example of innovation in the wine industry.
El Periódico: covered the story through the lens of how the sea “imprints character” on wines.
Tapas Magazine: the publication specializing in Spanish gastronomy included Crusoe Treasure among its editorial features.
El Español: an in-depth feature on the winery and its premium wine production model.

What this media coverage says about Crusoe Treasure

The media coverage Crusoe Treasure has accumulated over more than a decade is no coincidence. Media outlets—especially leading publications with demanding editorial teams and discerning readers—do not devote space to projects without substance.

What the international press has repeatedly confirmed, across very different cultural contexts, is that Crusoe Treasure brings together three elements that rarely coincide in a single offering:

Genuine innovation: It was not the first to have a curious idea, but the first to build a commercially viable, scientifically supported and environmentally committed underwater winery. The 500 m² artificial reef supporting the bottle cages is now home to more than five hundred different marine species. This is no photogenic backdrop. It is a functioning ecosystem.

Verifiable authenticity: Analyses by the Excell Ibérica laboratory show measurable chemical differences between wines aged under the sea and their counterparts aged in a conventional winery. The color changes—the reds shift toward more violet hues, the whites toward green—and the aromatic and flavor profiles transform in ways experts have consistently described as distinctive.

A universal story: Wine is thousands of years old. The sea is millions of years old. The idea that the two can come together to create something new and better resonates with something deep in the human imagination. You don’t need to be a wine expert to understand the promise of Crusoe Treasure. That is extraordinarily rare in such a technical industry as winemaking.

Tourism as an amplifier: Plentzia, Bizkaia, Euskadi

Every article published in an international outlet is also, indirectly, an article about Plentzia, Bizkaia and the Basque Country. The winery acts as an unwitting ambassador for a region that combines an Atlantic coastline, world-class gastronomy and a unique cultural identity.

In the months following the 2022 wave of media coverage, Crusoe Treasure welcomed visitors from the Netherlands, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States, among other countries. The profile of those drawn by the winery’s story aligns with Euskadi’s sustainable tourism strategy: wine lovers, interested in innovation and respectful of the natural environment.

The experiences offered by the winery—from a private tasting at the source to a boat trip to the underwater winery—have found their best ambassadors in this international audience. These are people who arrive after reading about it in an outlet in their home country, experience it firsthand, and share it with their own circles when they return.

Awards and recognition: the press as a reflection, not a cause

It would be incomplete to discuss Crusoe Treasure’s media coverage without noting that this attention is not simply the result of a well-told story. It also reflects winemaking quality recognized with international awards, and an environmental commitment the winery has upheld since its founding.

Winemaking director Antonio T. Palacios, one of Spain’s most acclaimed winemakers, oversees the selection of grapes from distinctive vineyards before the sea does its part. This rigor at the source, combined with the unique conditions of the underwater process, is what underpins both the awards and the editorial interest.

The winery is also part of the premium tourism brand Euskadi Basque Country Confidential, reinforcing its position as a leading destination for exclusive experiences in northern Spain.

When the world takes notice, there’s a reason

The fact that Associated Press, Euronews, The Guardian, CBS, TV Asahi, Deutsche Welle, El País, South China Morning Post and dozens of other media outlets have devoted editorial space to Crusoe Treasure is no coincidence, nor is it the result of a conventional public relations campaign. It is the natural consequence of building something genuinely new, backing it with science and sustaining it consistently for more than fifteen years.

The underwater wine of Plentzia Bay has shown that the most radical innovation sometimes comes not from Silicon Valley or the laboratories of major corporations, but from the determination of people convinced that the Cantabrian Sea could do something no winery in the world had ever attempted before.

Media outlets around the world have proved them right. The wines do too, sip by sip.

Bodega Crusoe Treasure is located in Plentzia Bay, Bizkaia. Its wines are available at underwaterwine.com. For wine-tourism experiences, guided tours and private tastings, visit the experiences section on the same website.