Pepe Marin is Back at Martha’s Vineyard

THE DEEP DIVE — INCLUDING A SUBMARINE CHAMPAGNE

An hour up the coast from this shop, twenty-four metres beneath the Mediterranean, there are bottles of wine sitting in the dark. They have been down there for the best part of a year. Nobody is refrigerating them, nobody is turning the lights off, and nobody is rocking them gently — the sea is doing all of it, for free, and doing it better than any cellar in Spain.

The man who put them there is Pepe Marin. Once a year he gets in the car, drives down to Moraira, and launches his new vintages here — in this shop, on this coast, before anybody else on the Costa Blanca gets near them.

He could do that anywhere. He chooses to do it here, and we have never quite got over it.

This is the one evening in our calendar we look forward to more than any other. Five wines. Twenty-four metres down. One man who can tell you exactly why that matters — and who has never once arrived without a surprise in the boot.

🌊 WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS DOWN THERE

Pepe’s cellar has no walls, no lights and no thermostat. It sits at Cabo de las Huertas, about a mile and a half off the bay of Alicante, at a point where converging currents keep renewing the water. The bottles are sealed with coloured wax and lowered into patented silos twenty-four metres down, where four things go to work on them at once and not one of them is switched on by anybody:

✔ A steady 15–19°C, all year, without a kilowatt of refrigeration
✔ The constant pressure of twenty-four metres of water
✔ Total darkness — no UV, no light-strike, no seasons
✔ The perpetual gentle movement of the current

It took seven years of research with the Universidad de Alicante to work out exactly how long each wine should stay down. They still analyse every batch that comes back up. And here is the part we like best: the silos have turned into artificial reefs. Marine life has moved in, and the posidonia meadows around them have started to regenerate.

The wine never touches the seawater. Nothing tastes of salt. Everything tastes further along than it should.

💧 READ THE FULL STORY OF THE SUBMARINE WINES →

🍾 THE LINEUP 🍾

Production is counted in hundreds of bottles, not thousands, and most of it is spoken for before it ever reaches a shelf. If you have been curious about these wines and put off spending three figures on a bottle you have never tasted — this is the evening that solves that, and it comes round once a year.

🥂 CH01 Champagne — matured beneath the Mediterranean
Start here, because this is the one. Champagne, taken down to twenty-four metres off Alicante and brought back up. It is a first for the bodega and, as far as anybody knows, a first full stop — and Pepe is opening it here. Whatever the sea does to a bead this fine, we are all going to find out together.

🥂 W03 Rías Baixas — 100% Albariño
Atlantic fruit, finished in the Mediterranean. Twenty-four hours of cold skin maceration and three months on its lees in Galicia, then nine months on the seabed. White flowers and orchard fruit on the nose; a palate with real volume and an almost oily texture. Albariño always tastes of the sea. This is the one that has actually been in it.

🌋 Auctoritas Ígneo 2023
Brand new, and made in very small quantities. Volcanic fruit off black Lanzarote rock, then down to the seabed like everything else Pepe makes. Volcanic soil and deep water is a combination almost nobody in the world has tried — which is rather the point of the evening.

🍷 W02 Rioja — Laguardia, Álava
100% Tempranillo from the Rioja Alavesa, fermented and aged in French oak barrels, then sealed with red wax and lowered into the Mediterranean for nine months. The producers say the vanilla and roasted coffee only appeared after it came back up. We will be asking about that.

🍷 W01 D.O. Ribera del Duero
Tinto Fino from Quintanilla de Arriba, eighteen months in new French oak, then nine months underwater. Smoke, leather, cocoa and black fruit, and a roundness it has no business having at this age. A proper finish to the evening.

And one we are not opening. Its big brother, the Alpha Ígneo 2021, stays in its box — the limited series above tonight’s Ígneo, nine hundred and sixty numbered bottles in the entire world. It is not a tasting wine. But it will be in the room, and you are very welcome to hold it.

🎁 AND WHATEVER ELSE IS IN THE BOOT

Here is the thing about Pepe: he has never turned up with only the lineup. Every single year there is something extra — a trial batch, a bottle that is not for sale anywhere, something he has been developing with a winery on the other side of the world. We have no idea what it will be this time. We find out at the same moment you do, and honestly that is half of why we love this night.

YOUR HOST FOR THE EVENING

Pepe Marin himself. The rest of the year he is somewhere else entirely, helping winemakers in other countries work out how to age wine on the seabed and opening new underwater sites here in Spain. He will tell you how his year has gone, what worked, what did not, and what is going down next — and he is very good company with it. Questions are always encouraged, and on this particular evening the man who made the wines is standing right there.

WHAT’S INCLUDED

✔ Five submarine-aged wines, newly released — led by the CH01 Champagne and the volcanic Auctoritas Ígneo 2023
✔ A surprise bottle from Pepe. There always is one. We never know what
✔ The winemaker himself, in the room, for one night only
✔ Film from the seabed off Alicante — the silos, the divers, the bottles coming up
✔ A look at the Alpha Ígneo — one of 960 bottles in the world
✔ First refusal on wines that are genuinely difficult to buy

€60 per person | Limited to 16 guests | 6pm – 8pm
Sixteen seats, once a year. Martha’s Vineyard Moraira — where the wine has travelled further than most of us.

Learn more about our Submarine Wines →