It was Homer who coined the term “wine-dark sea”. Now, 2,700 years after the Odyssey was written, Italians are taking the description rather literally.
This month three intrepid winemakers have been making their post-harvest process a little different — by dumping their grapes at the bottom of the sea.
This is not some 21st-century fancy. Sea-ageing grapes is a process that was perfected by winemakers on the Greek island of Chios 2,500 years ago. Chian wine was lauded across the ancient Mediterranean by writers such as Horace and Pliny. Julius Caesar is said to have served it at a banquet.
Now a handful of Italians are recreating the ancient process. Andrea Barrani, the 29-year-old owner of BarCa winery in the Cinque Terre coastal area of Liguria, submerged 300kg of bosco, a local grape, into the pristine waters of the marine national park on September 3.
As he dived down seven metres to plant wicker baskets of grapes on the bottom, he witnessed what looked like alchemy. “The grapes transformed into gold,” he said. “As we lowered the baskets, it looked like a shower of gold coins dropping onto the sea bed.”
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Barrani, who has inherited his late grandfather’s cliffside vineyard, recovered the grapes after 50 hours under water — a day earlier than planned because of the weather.
“The sweet-salty combination was really exceptional,” he said. He plans to make a dry white as well as sciacchetrà, Cinque Terre’s famed dessert wine, which was acclaimed by Dante and Boccaccio.
Barrani’s experiment came about after a friend read of research into Italy’s first underwater wine, which was produced on the Tuscan island of Elba. Antonio Arrighi first submerged his grapes in 2018. “People were saying, ‘You’ve gone mad. These beautiful grapes — you’re chucking them in the sea,’” he said. “Tourists came to see what fish we’d caught, and gave us funny looks when they saw grapes.”
Arrighi’s Nesos wine, which costs €200 a bottle, recreates the ancient Chian method, as researched by Attilio Scienza, a retired viticulture professor at the University of Milan. The pair met at a conference and decided to experiment.
Archaeological evidence suggests that the ancient Etruscans copied Chian wine on Elba to hawk around the Mediterranean at inflated prices, Scienza said.
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The Elban grape that Arrighi and Scienza use, ansonica, is thought to be descended from two Greek varietals. Arrighi immerses the grapes for five days at a depth of ten metres, and then sun-dries them on straw for three days. The dry grapes are then fermented in a terracotta amphora.
There is no need to add sulphites or stabilisers because the seawater helps to make “a natural wine that lives with the sea salt”, Arrighi said. The salt removes bloom from the grape skins and, through a process of osmosis, works its way into the grape itself.
“I wanted to see if it was drinkable,” he said of the duo’s first attempt. The first thing he noticed was the density of the wine, he said, followed by the taste: “There’s a hint of seaweed, of the shore after a storm. It doesn’t taste like any other wine.”
Arrighi has gone from making 40 bottles in 2018 to 240 today. “There are requests arriving from all over the world,” he said.
Also putting on his snorkel was Andrea Pala, who submerged vermentino grapes — Sardinia’s best-known white varietal — off the coast of the Maddalena archipelago to create the third vintage of Donna Ma’.
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“I’d never done anything like it,” said Pala, who used wicker baskets from an oyster farm to plunge the grapes underwater. “One vineyard is seven metres from the water, the other is 11 metres away, and the terrain is sandy,” he said. “You taste the sea.”
Professor Angela Zinnai from the University of Pisa, whose studies inspired the young winemakers to make their underwater blends, said: “The identity of the Mediterranean is wrapped up in wine and the sea. We are so strongly tied to the sea.”
It is a far cry from the 1920s, when restaurateurs would come to Cinque Terre to bulk-buy wine, Barrani said.
“My grandfather said they would taste it and spit it out, saying it was salty, to lower the price,” he said. “It’d be lovely to see my nonno’s face now as we throw the grapes in the sea to make it saltier.”
