A few days ago, we welcomed a very special visit at Bodega Crusoe Treasure: our Japanese importers came to meet us in person. It was a time of great learning. One of the highlights was meeting our winemaker Antonio T. Palacios , and we would like to share it with you.
Meeting our winemaker
Speaking with Antonio is always a pleasure and a constant source of learning, so we visited his analytical laboratory and even joined him for one of his sensory tasting classes at the University of La Rioja, where he conducted a comparative tasting of a Duet Sea Soul Nº7, our underwater white wine, and a Duet Sea Soul Nº8, one of our underwater red wines.
The response was astonishing: despite knowing little about the process, everyone immediately noticed the differences and chose the underwater sample.
“I was surprised—it is more enveloping, more complex on the palate,” said Cristina, one of Antonio’s students, speaking about our underwater white wine.
Here we share part of Antonio’s explanation to his students, together with some of the questions that arose. We recommend reading it:
Question: What does the sea bring to wine?
Antonio: “Wines […] become softer, more velvety; polymerisation increases. All of this is achieved by making a wine suited to underwater ageing. Sensory-wise, you achieve a fusion of acidity and tannins: the wines are more luscious, more integrated.”
Question: What factors influence the evolution of wine beneath the sea?
Antonio: “The waves, the currents, depending on the season… […] all the changes in temperature, changes in pressure, the currents, the kinetics themselves, the movement of the water—all that energy makes the wine bottle go wild. It is the antithesis of the oenology of stillness and patience. To submerge wine, we need bold, powerful wines, with tannins and acidity—wines that can withstand the sea’s onslaught; otherwise, the sea will destroy them.”
Question: Is the oxygen in underwater wine the oxygen contained in the cork itself?”
Antonio: "No. Underwater wines begin with more oxygen than terrestrial wines because of the pressure. More oxygen enters the bottle than on land, under terrestrial atmospheric pressure. This is due to the pressure to which the wine bottles are subjected beneath the sea. In any case, we are talking about nano-oxygenation.”
Question: If oxygen can enter, could salt enter too?
Antonio: "No, neither water nor salt enters. We carry out many different analyses to demonstrate that this does not happen—analyses that we submit to the health authorities.”
Question: Can we say that what you obtain in 10 years in a terrestrial winery, you obtain in 2 years beneath the sea?
Antonio: “That mental association exists, but you will not arrive at the same place or end up with the same profile. You can see this when tasting the wines. It is not simply a matter of time, but of a sensory journey. It is a different journey, an evolutionary journey that leads to more accelerated ageing, but that does not mean that patience and time on land will take you to the same place.
Beneath the sea, energy is transmitted through the bottle, together with a greater presence of oxygen, which makes the underwater wine breathe more. That, along with the changes in temperature that cause the volume inside the bottle to change, is highly beneficial to chemical kinetics.”
Question: What type of cork is used?
Antonio: "We use technical corks made so that they are highly consistent with one another, with an OTR—the transfer of oxygen through the cork—that is exactly the same from one cork to the next. This is vital for underwater wine. The evolution of underwater wine is linked to the amount of oxygen and to the changes in kinetics driven by marine energy inside the bottle. This makes the chemistry—especially the phenomena of polymerisation and the combination of tannins and anthocyanins—proceed much faster than on land. There is only one factor it shares with terrestrial ageing: darkness.”
Question: What is underwater ageing?
Antonio: "The subtle changes in temperature—we are talking about just a few tenths of a degree—from one season to another; from summer to winter they may be greater, but in reality the changes are very small. Then there are the pressure changes from wave to wave: waves can range from 1m to 9m in height. All of this causes marine kinetics to modify oxygen transfer and chemical kinetics as well. All of this changes the wine, allowing it to evolve positively if the wine is clean, stable and free from microorganisms.
The sea multiplies the wine you submerge several times over by “X”. If you submerge a poor wine, you will bring out an even poorer wine; but if you make a good wine designed to be submerged, you will bring out a wine that benefits from both the sea and the land.”
Question: Can we begin tasting the underwater white wine?
Antonio: “In the case of white wine, on the nose, there is a dimension in which the sea can be sensed. I do not know whether it is subjective—it may be—but I detect a hint of sea breeze, aromas that lead you towards minerality in the aromatic profile. […] The aromatic undertone of sea breeze makes it very elegant and very appealing. If you have an underwater wine and it smells of the sea, it smells good. But taste it and tell me what you feel.”
These are some of the highlights of our winemaker’s masterclass.
Would you like to experience the difference for yourself?
Discover our packs: Duet Sea Soul Nº7 and Duet Sea Soul Nº8.