On screen, white capital letters read “TRYING THE RAREST WINE IN THE WORLD,” and the voice over matches: “Today I’m trying the world’s rarest wine, aged at the bottom of the ocean for 15 years.” The video comes from the account @eatingwithtod, which shows the name Eating with Tod, and its caption reads “I tried the worlds rarest wine” with the tags #wine, #spain and #foodie.
“The day begins as we set sail across Galicia in northern Spain to a mussel farm hiding something pretty special beneath the water,” he says. The first frames show a tall sailing ship dressed in flags and a crowd gathered on a boat deck, with a crane lifting a dripping, mussel crusted column out of the sea.
The numbers come from the creator’s narration. “Fifteen years ago, 120 bottles of one of a kind Albarino were lowered into the bottom of the ocean, surrounded by mussels and marine life,” he says. “Today, only 30 bottles survived.” He adds that the project was carried out by two wine experts, and explains why the sea matters: “The pressure, the darkness, the constant temperature and movement of the sea completely changed the aging process, creating a flavour profile you simply can’t recreate in a normal cellar.”
The frames show what that looks like in practice. People on deck pull handfuls of growth away from a bottle shaped mass, and a man in a grey polo holds up a dark bottle while onlookers film. A bearded man in a black shirt holds another bottle up to his nose. Then the creator, wearing a white cap, glasses and a patterned shirt, holds up a glass of pale wine against the sky, sniffs it, and drinks.
The meal is the second half of the story. “Now, to pair with the wine, we feasted on a Ruby Galicia cow, which was born on the same day they buried the wine,” he says. He credits the butchering to a man he calls “basically the king of Spanish beef,” and the frames show a board of marbled cuts, a butcher in a black beret working a large joint, a man in black gloves holding up a large bone in cut, and the creator posing with another beside his face. “Look how crazy the marbling is,” he says. “It literally looks like Wagyu.”
The cooking is as simple as the setting. “They were thrown over charcoal at the front of the boat and then seasoned the only way it should be in Galicia. Loads of sea salt and served still mooing.” Frames show the steak on a grill with smoke rising, a cook scattering salt over a plate of sliced meat, and the creator eating a piece. The closing line is the pairing itself: “15 year old beef, 15 year old wine. One aged on land, the other at the bottom of the Atlantic.”
Some background helps explain the setting. According to Foods and Wines from Spain, the Spanish trade promotion body, Galician mussels are grown on floating wooden rafts from which producers hang ropes up to 12 metres long, with each raft frame covering up to 500 square metres and carrying a maximum of 500 ropes. The same source says the mussels reach commercial size in about 17 months and filter up to 8 litres of water per hour. The source says the rias, the former river valleys flooded by the sea, provide the ecosystems used for the farms, along a Galician coastline of about 1,200 kilometres.
The grape is also a regional one. Foods and Wines from Spain lists Albariño first among the principal white grapes of the Rias Baixas Denomination of Origin in Galicia, a designation granted in 1988, and gives the area’s average rainfall as 1,691 millimetres a year. Those details describe the region, not this bottle.
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