Why do we plunge our wines?

We will try to explain why we are doing what we call “Underwater Treasuring” to make wine and other drinks at the bottom of the sea which we created in 2007-2008.

After years of research in our laboratory called LSEB-Plentzia, we came to the conclusion that the wines located at the bottom of our brave sea, using the method we designed, improved substantially. This is how we created the Crusoe Treasure brand and our process. This was already reflected in the labelling of our first wines.

This term, which we have coined to name our winemaking process, has its origin in the submerged treasures, in taking great care of (treasuring) both the wine and the marine life, reflected in our logo, featuring wine and marine species.

According to the Spanish Royal Academy (a linguistic institution), treasuring means “gathering and storing things of value” and this is precisely what we do with our underwater wines, we make them in order to “store” them and take care of them under the sea until our oenologist tells us that their evolution beneath the sea has reached the appropriate time.

Our wines are designed on land by the great master Antonio T. Palacios, to then evolve under the sea. The whole process of elaboration on land is aimed at achieving the maximum expression of the wine during its underwater treasuring.

On land, treasuring, for us implies a year after another of taking care of the vineyard, to then select the highest quality grapes, at the right time, when their parameters reach the ideal levels needed to become the soul of our wines.

After the process of harvesting and vinification, they are aged in oak barrels so that once our master winemaker decides that it is time to bottle them, he prepares everything for their immersion in the sea. In our underwater infrastructure, our artificial reef-cellar, they will face the currents, weightlessness, pressure, tides, calms and storms.

The result is a unique, limited edition wine resulting from the best of the land and the sea.

Our 10 wines include 8 single-variety wines and 2 coupages. Tempranillo, Maturana, Tinta fina, different types of Grenache, Syrah , Albariño and Viognier among others.

The diversity of our geography allows us to select the best vineyards, looking for hidden treasures based on the age of the vineyard, the grape, and seasonal changes. Once we incorporate a vineyard into our family of wines, we start working towards obtaining the best possible fruit from it and harvesting it at the optimum time.

After the fermentation of the wine and its subsequent aging in barrels, the best of the land is selected and bottled with a special sealing and cork to support the atmosphere of our underwater cellar. Here begins our pioneering process of underwater treasuring. The bottles are transferred to our underwater cellar in Plentzia, where each bottle is placed in a cage suitable for storing wine and these are then immersed in the sea, within our underwater caves, where the ocean takes over to finish designing and polishing our oenological treasures. Our process allows the contact of the sea with the wine bottles or barrels. The different conditions, the energy transmitted by the sea added to a period of time of optimum underwater storage for each wine does the rest.

The wines are treasured 20 meters below the sea, which during these specific periods of time are subjected to weightlessness, absolute darkness, surrounded by marine life and gently rocked by the ocean. The darkness, the temperature of continuous minimum changes, the pressure variations and the higher oxygenation of our wines result in complex, softer, more floral, very rounded and integrated wines, according to experts and not so experts.

The differentiating factors of our underwater treasuring process are

• Temperature: The wines are subjected to small changes in temperature, without exceeding 18ºC or going below 12ºC.
• Pressure: The wines are subjected to a pressure of 3 bars (3 atm), this causes the partial pressure of oxygen inside the bottle to change, and to be greater inside than outside. Together with the lower gravity, it facilitates the process of evolution of the wine.
• Movement: Subject to the constant balancing of currents, tides (every 6 hours) and waves (our sea is one of the roughest on the planet), our wines do not rest, they rock, and evolve at the constant rhythm of the underwater universe.
• Less gravity: Being under water, the weight of the objects is lower. The same happens with liquids, wine is therefore subjected to greater pressure that affects its structure in a state of weightlessness that facilitates its balancing and evolution.
• Tides: Every six hours the sea rises or falls up to 4 metres in height continuously. This is one of the effects of the moon. It is the biodynamics taken to the extreme in the production of a wine. These strong tides increase or decrease the pressure on the wines, making the wines “breathe” more or less every six hours.

The ocean is where the magic happens.

Under the sea our bottles and barrels live together, carefully monitored by sensors and in the company of the marine life of the beautiful and wild Cantabrian Sea.

Do you want to taste the result?