Has making wine for some winemaker gone beyond producing good wine?

Last February I was invited to a wine event in London open to wines from all over the world, not just Italian, and during the dinner that followed, I sat next to a French winemaker that was ageing his wines under the sea. He opened several bottles for the whole table to drink. A few days ago, I saw an advert from a Sardinian winery promoting a wine aged under the sea, it was all about the Sardinian crystal clear sea water and little about the wine. Immediately the French winemaker and his wines came back to my mind and I started to think whether, wineries and winemakers, to emerge for an overcrowded market, were going too far.

I haven’t tasted the Sardinian wines, but I did drink the French ones and were they great? no they weren’t. One of them, the red, was ok, drinkable, the white not even that, it had lost all its freshness, it wasn’t faulty, it had simply passed its best. I can’t remember the grape they were made from, but you could not smell or taste any of their characteristic aromas or flavours.

Still, due to the costs involved in ageing the wines under the sea, he showed the whole process with boats and helicopters and divers, their prices were very high, way higher considering their quality. The wines, without the process, I believe would have been an everyday, nothing to rave about, wines and the underwater ageing had accelerated the process.

Having tasted the wine only after the underwater ageing, I can’t comment on their quality before they were put to age under the sea, but I certainly wasn’t prepared to pay the asking price. The explanation I was given by the winemaker behind his choice was that in the water, temperatures are stable, there is minimum light and sea currents constantly hit the bottles gently moving the wine inside the bottle. My impression was that the ageing under the sea had accelerated the ageing process and the wines, despite being just released, were almost oxidized.

On top of that, I did not like that the bottles had been brought to the table exactly like they had been taken out of the sea, with plenty of sand and shells still attached, so that every time you were touching the bottle or pouring the wine the sand will go all over the table and food. I asked the winemaker why not clean the bottle before and he rightly said that if the bottle were to be cleaned, nobody would know of the under sea water ageing.

It was a very interesting conversation but it made me wonder how far wine makers are actually going in the hope their wines will sell - sometime at crazy prices - in a very crowded market already full of good and great wines, where the easiest option to stand out seems to be one that has nothing to do with the wine itself.