By Virginia Van Zandt
Winemakers usually have expensive underground cellars to age their wine, but one Italian innovator decided to be different and age his wine at the bottom of the ocean — producing exceptional wine and great returns.
The global wine market is one of the most competitive, but innovative products can still stand out against the world’s most storied brands. Marco Bacci’s story is a master class in product development, marketing, and business acumen.
Bacci Wines sells 100,000 cases in the U.S. and sells another 40,000 cases per year in Europe. Global economic slowdowns haven’t slowed Bacci’s roll. Bacci’s wine sales seem to be increasing.
Bacci began working at his family’s Florence-based jean production business in the 1980s. He quickly learned how to manage for results, growing production from 300 pairs of jeans per day to 25,000 per day in two years.
Bacci sold the jean business in 1998 and bought his first vineyard, called Castello di Bossi in Chianti Classico. He bought another vineyard, called Renieri, in Brunello di Montalcino, shortly thereafter. He purchased the seaside Terre di Talamo vineyard, where his underwater wine is aged, in 2000. Today Bacci’s production sprawls over six vineyards in Tuscany.
A barnacle-clad wine bottle on a terrace of Bacci's Tuscan vineyard.
Sales have grown from $3,000 in the first full year to more than $15 million today. Bacci Wines won the first-place award for wine of the year at Total Wine, America’s largest wine retailer, in 2020.
Inspiration struck when Bacci noticed that the wine stored on his sail boat was aging better than the wine in his cellar. Why not age wine under the ocean instead of under the soil? It would take six long years of negotiation with Italian regulators before Bacci could start putting his bottles in locked cages on the sandy bottoms of the Mediterranean.
Bacci has not been the only one to age his alcohol underwater. A distillery on the French island of Ouessant, some 400 miles west of Paris, ages its whisky some 65 feet undersea for up to 11 months. When the whisky bottles are hauled up, they are often covered with barnacles. A gin company in the Azores, a Portuguese island chain in the Atlantic, leaves its gin bottles on the seabed for up to 2 years, and then divers who have purchased the bottles swim down to retrieve them.
Bacci’s underwater wine is aged off the shore of his seaside vineyard in Marema, in sight of the peninsula of Argentario, some 100 miles northwest of Rome.
One of the few places Americans can taste Bacci’s underwater wine is at Noe Landini’s Landini Brothers restaurant in Alexandra, Virginia. Landini first met Bacci through a cousin of his (Landini’s family hails from Argentario island), and their business partnership bloomed out of an international shipping mishap.
Landini was hosting a wine tasting dinner for another wine producer, the Baracchi family, at his restaurant in Virginia. During preparation, the general manager noticed that Baracchi’s wines had not yet been delivered to the restaurant from Italy. Bacci, who happened to be in town and was just attending as a guest, offered some of his bottles for the tasting. Bacchi’s wine ended up being the hit of the dinner, and Landini set out to add Bacchi Wines to his wine list.
“Wine is such a fine making such a delicate process when it comes down to all the different steps from planting and viniculture,” said Landini. “Everything Marco does he has to do the very best or he doesn’t do it.”
“Some of the elements in the sea that can't be duplicated on land. Well, at 30 meters (90 feet), you have a constant temperature that almost never changes, you've got currents that can move the wine just ever so slightly. And as we all know, in wine and spirits and whiskey and rum, you've there are good examples of that, to where, you know, that slight movement helps the maturing process, the aging process of that spirit,” said Landini.
A case of wine bottles being surfaced after one year aging under the waves.
The pressure at 35 meters (114 feet) under the sea is the perfect environment for wines to mature, Bacci said. “The storms move the wine bottles under the water, which helps mature the wine.”
Once he had permission from the government, Bacci still had to figure out how to make the underwater aging process work. It wasn’t easy. It took four years to work out. Now, Bacci’s underwater section of his vineyard runs 100 yards by 100 yards and can store up to 50,000 bottles of wine. Bacci dives down to check the bottles himself about once per month.
Bacci’s bottles accumulate barnacles throughout the six months to a year that they are stored underwater – vineyard staff scrape them off after they have been resurfaced.
One might wonder if these sea creatures disrupt the process, but the bottles are sealed and no marine life can get inside. But the bottles themselves form a kind of artificial reef, which appears beneficial. Bacci says he is proud that his underwater wine-aging plot has created a haven for fish and lobsters.
“It’s very emotional to see. It’s an ecosystem now. There was nothing there before, only sand. We created life where there was nothing there,” said Bacci.
Selling wine is always a challenge given that restaurants don’t want to add to their wine list and American customers are not eager to experiment with wines they haven’t tasted before.
Bacci Wines is a family business; Bacci’s son Jacobo heads the sales and distribution of Bacci Wines, visiting restaurateurs to till his unusual story. The unique underwater aging process makes them curious, Jacobo said, and the wine inside usually closes the deal.
“The wine business is really, really competitive. It’s not an easy job. But we’ve added markets in North America, Europe, and Asia, and we’re selling out all our production,” he said.
Marco Bacci and his dog, Baba, on a boat off the coast of Tuscany with wine freshly retrieved from ... [+]
It is actually harder to sell wine to Americans than Europeans, Jacobo said, because Americans switch jobs every few years while Europeans usually stay in the same family-run establishments for decades. So Jacobo often spends a lot of time trying to locate the manager that he successfully sold wine to a year or two before, but when he does, the man inevitably says “oh, the underwater wine guy.” So Bacci’s underwater innovation has become a durable business advantage.
The most beloved vineyard worker isn’t a diver or a wine hand, but a hard hair dachshund named Baba. Baba usually accompanies Bacci out to sea for Bacci’s underwater wine dives. Bacci lovingly calls Baba his “marketing director,” but his most memorable calling card is his innovative way of aging wine, under the Tuscan waves.
