Dive Deep Into a Shipwreck Cellar at Croatia's First Underwater Winery
Tour a wine cellar in a shipwreck and bring your own bottle back to the surface.
After spending a day, evening or both sipping on your favourite wine, you might feel as though you've been soaking in boozy grape juice. That's understandable. You'll feel the same when you're enjoying a glass of Edivo Vina's tipples — but expect to dive deeper, literally.
Edivo Vina is Croatia's first underwater winery, and they're now open for visitors. Yes, that means doing more than simply plunging your face into a wine glass. You'll descend into the ocean's depths to explore their operations, and check out a sunken shipwreck that's used as their underwater cellar while you're down there. And, you can even help bring your own bottle of vino back up to the surface.
Located off of the coast of Drače on the Pelješac Peninsula, the winery first starts their booze-making process on land, where their wines are aged for three months. They're then stored in clay jugs known as amphorae, corked and protected by two layers of rubber, and submerged 18 to 25 metres into the sea for one to two years.
Relying upon natural cooling, giving the booze a pinewood aroma and also benefiting from the water's "perfect silence" — because quiet wine-making is the best wine-making, apparently — it's a system that the ancient Greeks used. They are known for their love of wine, after all. Unsurprisingly, after such a substantial stint in the ocean, the bottles come back to the surface coated in shells, corrals and algae. Now that's something you won't find at your local bottle-o.
Images: Edivo Vina.
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