MICHAEL FRIDJHON: You don’t need an aqualung to age your wines
Regardless of how you store them, the most important thing to remember is to drink them at their peak of perfection
A recent article in Bloomberg, reproduced in full on these pages, told the story of a wine storage project in California that had fallen foul of environmentalists. For those of you lucky enough to have missed it, the main feature of the storage scheme was that the wines were aged under the ocean. The project was inspired by the discovery of drinkable champagne salvaged from the Baltic Sea floor in 2010, 94 years after the ship went down
The original Baltic Champagne story dates to the 1997 recovery of 3,000 bottles of 1907 Heidsieck & Co Champagne from the Swedish schooner Jönköping sunk in 1916. The fizz lay at a depth of about 65m, which means the water pressure was no greater than the carbon dioxide pressure in the bottles, so seawater never penetrated beyond the corks...
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