Submerged Thalassitis · Since 2009
The Story of Submerged Thalassitis
A wine that ages 25 metres below the surface of the Aegean, in the darkness and silence of the seabed. The idea, the first experiment and everything we learned in the years that followed.
01
The idea
What if the cellar were the sea?
Santorini Assyrtiko is one of the few white wines in the world that stand the test of time. Its high acidity gives it real ageing potential — but every year of ageing on land also means a little oxidation. The question Yiannis Paraskevopoulos and Leon Karatsalos asked was simple: can Thalassitis mature without oxidising?
The answer lay right next to the winery. On the floor of the Aegean the temperature is stable all year round, light is completely absent and no oxygen reaches the bottle. Everything an ideal cellar needs — except that this cellar is the sea. Thalassitis, “the one that comes from the sea”, would return to its element.
02
The first experiment
2009: the first 500 bottles on the seabed
In 2009 the first 500 bottles of Thalassitis were placed in metal cages and sunk off the east coast of Santorini, at a depth of 25 metres. Nobody knew what would come out — or whether anything would.
The first lesson was a hard one. The pressure at 25 metres proved too much for the first corks: of the 500 bottles of 2009, only three surfaced intact. The following years went better — 258 bottles from 2010, 141 from 2011 — but the 2012 and 2013 vintages were almost entirely lost: of 1,050 bottles, 37 came back. An experiment, however, learns from its failures. The corks and the sealing changed, the cage was secured better on the seabed, and the results were transformed: 400 bottles from 2014, 407 from 2015, 497 from 2016.
03
The recovery
Four years later
The bottles surface four years after submersion, dressed in shells, seaweed and marine sediment. Their appearance says “old wine”. The glass says something else.
The colour remains bright and youthful, with no trace of oxidation. On the nose come the smoky notes and the characteristic hydrocarbon aroma of mature Santorini, while the palate is rounder and more evolved than Thalassitis aged on land. A wine that is young and mature at the same time.
A rare “hybrid” that balances between youth and maturity.
04
Today
An underwater cellar that never stops
The experiment became an institution. Every year around 500 bottles of the current Thalassitis vintage go down to the underwater cellar, and every year the vintage that has completed its four years on the seabed comes up. So the cellar always holds four consecutive vintages — the 2018, for example, was released in August 2023.
The wine is the same Assyrtiko from the old, ungrafted vines of Episkopi, Pyrgos and Akrotiri, with yields that never exceed 25 hl/ha. The method, though, remains rare: only around ten wineries in the world age wine beneath the sea. Submerged Thalassitis is released in a limited number of bottles each year — each one with its story written on the glass.
In pictures
From the seabed to the surface
On the seabed
The recovery
The bottles
On video
