Santa Barbara County’s district attorney said authorities poured out nearly 2,000 bottles of wine they said were aged on the ocean floor illegally by Ocean Fathoms.
COOS BAY, Ore. — A controversial wine company that faced criminal charges for operating illegally in California has moved its headquarters to Oregon’s south coast.
The company, known as Ocean Fathoms, captured attention for its unique business model: It ages wine on the ocean floor, calling it “nature’s perfect wine cellar.”
Authorities in California said the founders of the company failed to have the proper permitting and licensing when they operated out of Santa Barbara. The Santa Barbara District Attorney’s Office pursued misdemeanor charges against the two top employees.
District Attorney John Savrnoch told KGW, “Basically, every aspect of that business was either operating illegally or without the permits they claimed they had, but that is the experience in Santa Barbara County.
The wine company’s CEO, Chris Cuvelier, said the company founders may have made mistakes in the beginning, but the new and improved company is starting fresh in Oregon. Employees have applied for permits under a new company name, Neptune’s Vault.
“We’ve appreciated Coos Bay, and a lot of the local agencies have welcomed us with open arms,” Cuvelier said, “but we definitely moved out of California just because of the rules and regulations and them really not willing to work with us in a way would be productive and pro-business.”
In a promotional video for the company, employees are seen on a ship helping lower a large wire cage full of wine bottles into the ocean. They recover another cage they say has been at the bottom of the ocean for a year — aging wine from various wineries. The recovered bottles are covered with barnacles and sea creatures in the cages.
Cuvelier said leaving the bottles in the ocean ages the wine more quickly than a regular wine cellar and smooths out the taste, “which essentially takes advantage of the cold-water temperature … the motion of the ocean, the lack of light and the galvanic current that naturally occurs in the metal cages.”
Plus, he said customers consider the bottles works of art with the barnacles and sea creatures stuck to the side.
Savrnoch, though, questions why customers would pay hundreds of dollars for a bottle of regular wine that disrupts sea life.
“It’s not just a gimmick,” said Cuvelier. “There really is a process here with our patent. It does improve the quality of the wine, and you end up with these beautiful bottles we call one of one.”
Oregon state Sen. David Brock Smith from Port Orford says he knows about the permit and licensing issues the company faced in California but is still a big supporter of the operation in Coos Bay.
“In Coos Bay, we have seen generations of poverty,” he said, “so, any type of economic development or any type of situation — especially Ocean Fathoms, it’s so unique — that brings business and industry to Coos Bay.”
Coos Bay’s mayor is all for it, too, even though some of his newsletter readers have questioned potential damage to the local environment.
“I’m also confident in the agencies we have,” said Mayor Joe Benetti. “They’ll do the research and the due diligence, and as you stated, it’s taken a little bit longer for Ocean Fathoms to be located here as quickly as they’d like, but I think it’s prudent we go through that process to make sure things are done properly.”
Cuvelier claims the company is taking every step to make sure the operation is environmentally sound.
He said they are still awaiting permits and the go-ahead from a number of government agencies to sink up to 45 cases of wine near the Southern Slough, outside Coos Bay.
“For us, it’s a 4′-by-4′ by-4′ metal cage,” Cuvelier said. “We liken it to a big crab trap filled with wine, but a lot of the agencies, both federal and state, are treating us like Big Oil or a big wind project, so it’s taken quite a long time.”
In the meantime, the company is reaching out to researchers in Oregon to help study the effects of the ocean currents on wine and spirits and the reason it improves products.
“We are just very transparent that we don’t know exactly why … we just know that it works, and now, it’s our job, in order to go lead the category, is make sure we’re doing the science behind it,” he said.