ENGOO.COM / Croatian Winery Offers Undersea Cellar Tours

Croatian Winery Offers Undersea Cellar Tours

It’s not unusual when visiting a European winery to take a tour of the wine cellar before tasting some of the wines. But there’s one winery in Croatia where you’ll need to put on a wetsuit to visit the wine cellar — because it’s under the sea!

The Edivo Winery is located in the village of Drače, about one hour from the city of Dubrovnik. Here, if you have a diving certification, you can take a scuba diving tour of the underwater cellar — which is located on a sunken ship 14 meters under the sea.

And after a dive, you can enjoy a wine tasting with some tasty snacks at the Edivo wine bar.

But why keep wine under the sea?

The founders of the Edivo Winery believe the constant cool temperature, lack of sunlight, and silence under the sea create perfect conditions for aging wine. However, it took them a few years of research to figure out how to do this successfully.

The bottles are corked, and to keep seawater out, they’re sealed with two layers of rubber. Some bottles are also put inside a kind of clay jug called an amphora, which looks very much like the amphoras that ancient Greeks and Romans used.

Such ancient jugs can be found very easily under the sea in this area, so the Edivo Winery uses amphoras partly as a tribute to local history — but also because they stop the sunlight from reaching the bottles.

Wines of the same year and variety can be aged three different ways: in a traditional cellar on land, in a bottle underwater, or in an amphora underwater — resulting in very different flavors.

Even if you don’t want to take a scuba diving tour, you can still try these wines in the Edivo wine bar, and maybe take home a unique souvenir — a bottle of wine or an amphora covered in coral and seashells!