Can’t afford a wine cellar? Just put your wine into the ocean and let it sit there for a year.

Some folks put 300 bottles of red wine and 300 bottles of whites in wooden crates and lowered them into the sea off the northern coast of France. After a year submerged in seawater, they were pulled up, and a panel of experts was convened to taste the wines to see if that type of storage had an effect.

An item in thescotsman.com said the bottles were “covered in barnacles and draped with seaweed” and the crates “allowed the tides to flow in and out.”

The panel tasted two of the submerged reds and two whites and compared them to wine stored in the normal manner, and they “were able to distinguish without hesitation” the water-stored wines. “The reds which had been submerged have a much slower evolution and are set to become wines to keep,” said one taster.

(If you don’t live close to the ocean, will a deep swimming pool do?)

More celebrity wine

Another celebrity gets into the wine biz.

Dan Aykroyd, who starred in “Ghostbusters” and “Blues Brothers” along with being a long-time “Saturday Night Live” regular, is lending his name to a wine to be made in Canada in the heart of the Ontario wine industry. The Dan Aykroyd Winery will produce chardonnay and a cabernet sauvignon/merlot blend when it’s completed in 2008.

(Maybe it will be a ghost winery.)

Thanks to Juanita

The name Juanita Swedenburg may not be familiar to most readers, but those who are engaged in direct shipping of wine are mourning her recent death.

Swedenburg was the woman in Virginia who challenged the direct shipping laws, and her case was one of those that received a favorable ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court a few years ago. During the five years the case was going through the system, she sold her 2,000 cases of wine only at the winery in Middleburg because she was concerned that someone might trick her into sending an illegal shipment. She was persistent in pursuing the case, and the wine industry is grateful to her.

(I’m sure vintners join me in saying, “Great job, Juanita. Rest in peace.”)

Aussies still

have problems

Aussie wine producers have taken another hit. First they had a glut and had enough surplus wine to fill the equivalent of 256 Olympic-size swimming pools, then a severe drought came, followed by brushfires, and now Hunter Valley, one of the major wine producing regions, has been inundated by floods.

More than eight inches of rain fell in a single day and more than a foot fell altogether in what was termed the most significant flood in 35 years. One grower said his vineyard was under four feet of water and another said deep ruts were carved out in his vineyard.

There is a bit of good news, though. Because this is their winter, the vines are dormant, so there won’t be much lasting damage, and the reservoirs are full.

Another report from Down Under said that Australia’s grape harvest was the lowest in a decade, with red grapes down 35 percent from last year, and whites down 14 percent.

(With the glut gone, there’s room in those 256 swimming pools for all that water.)

Matchmaking wine

An item on Harpers.co.uk tells of a new Web site, Soif du Coeur (Thirsty Heart), that says it will pair single wine lovers with their ideal match. Prospective daters buy a $4 bottle of Soif du Coeur wine that has a code printed on the back. They enter the code on the Web site, which matches them up with a potential mate.

The wine, a merlot/cabernet red, cabernet/merlot rosé and a sauvignon blanc/semillon, has a red label with a male symbol and a blue label with a female symbol.

The producers say they are negotiating to bring the concept to the U.S., Canada and Russia.

(Four dollars? That sounds like a real cheap date.)

EU plans promotion

The European Union is proposing to spend at least $160 million each year to promote European wines around the world from 2009 through 2015. The proposal is part of the plan to cope with the wine glut currently facing European producers.

Part of the overall plan is to uproot nearly 500,000 acres of vines, about half of what had originally been suggested. The plan also calls for scrapping the idea of distilling unsold wine for use as bio-fuel. It’s too costly.

(If a car uses too much bio-fuel distilled from wine, could it get picked up on a DUI?)

   

Quote of the week

“The Irish believe that fairies are extremely fond of good wine. The proof of the assertion is that in the olden days royalty would leave a keg of wine out for them at night. Sure enough, it was always gone in the morning.” — Irish  Folklore

Jack Heeger can be reached at jheeger@napanews.com.