TO purists it may be a crime, but French wine buffs believe they have come up with a better place for storing wine than the cellar. They have taken to dumping it - quelle horreur - on the seabed.

It has given rise to a new vocabulary in wine appreciation, as was made clear by the six oenophiles who gathered last week on the Brittany coast for a blind tasting of Loire wines, some of which had spent a year with the crabs on the bottom of Saint-Malo bay.

Whether or not “wet” wines come to join red and white on the list, “underwater whites”, said Christophe Daviaud, a wine maker, “have more obvious wood aromas, more of the toasted barrel”. He went on: “The submerged reds have evolved more slowly than the nonsubmerged ones.”

The curious ceremony was organised by Yannick Heude, a wine shop owner, who watched anxiously from the shore as a crab boat helped by abalone fishermen in wetsuits winched up two enormous crates covered in seaweed and limpets from a depth of 30ft.

Six hundred bottles, half red and half white, had been stored for the past year in the slatted wooden crates that allowed a current of eight knots (9mph), as Heude put it, to “massage the bottles twice a day”.

Was this massage responsible for the different flavour? “The ageing effect is certainly different than on land,” said Heude, who detected a “certain extra freshness” in the underwater whites.

“We knew the sea was a good wine cellar because in terms of the level of humidity, you couldn’t find better.”

He went on: “There’s no ultraviolet sunlight and the average temperature is stable at between 9C and 12C below 10 metres. What we didn’t know was the effect of the tides and the currents. They amplify the wine’s evolution, which seems younger when it comes out of the sea, but with smoother and rounder flavours and smells.”

Heude said the idea of entrusting wine to the deep came to him and two fishermen friends at a wine tasting when they realised they were united by “wine and a passion for the sea”. A South African producer already stores his barrels in a lake because it is cheaper.

Daviaud, who made the Anjou Village de Brissac-Quincé wines that were submerged in the bay of Saint-Malo, believed the effect on red wine could be to slow down the ageing process, prolonging life on the shelf - or in the ocean.

The bay was chosen because of its strong tides. Another 600 bottles have been lowered into the water for a one-year massage. “Now each year we will do it again,” said Heude.

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