Our Story
How a marine biologist and a winemaker built a cellar on the Mediterranean floor.
It started with one bottle of wine and two people who couldn't stay out of the water.
Mariona grew up in the Pyrenees and left the mountains for the sea. She trained as an environmental scientist, earned a Master's in Biodiversity, and spent years doing conservation and diving work across five continents. Gergő grew up the other way around, inside his family's Hungarian winery, pulling harvests and cleaning barrels long before he studied wine formally. They met the way the rest of the story goes: underwater.
When wine pulled Gergő back toward his roots, the two of them put their worlds together. What if the sea could finish the aging a cellar only starts? That question became ElixSea, the elixir of the sea. Today every bottle spends its final months on the Mediterranean seabed, in the cold and the dark, rocked slowly by the current.
The encounter
When two worlds meet
After a rather unlikely series of coincidences, their paths finally cross in 2016.
Despite their different backgrounds, they soon discover a few shared interests: nature, good wine, the sea, and a tendency to turn perfectly reasonable ideas into adventures.
The crazy idea
What if...?
One day, a rather strange question comes up. What would wine recovered from a shipwreck taste like?
Unfortunately, spending a small fortune on a bottle recovered from an actual shipwreck isn't particularly realistic.
Making our own, however...
The first experiment
Let's give it a try
A few bottles, plenty of enthusiasm, and absolutely no idea whether any of this will work.
Down they go, into the Mediterranean. And then comes the hardest part: waiting.
Something is happening
More questions than answers
Months later, our bottles return to the surface, covered in marine life. But we're far more interested in what's inside.
The results catch the attention of wine experts and winemakers, who offer their knowledge and wines to help us experiment further.
Our friends, meanwhile, start asking if they can buy a few bottles. Not a bad idea, considering someone has to help us finance all this curiosity.
ElixSea is born
Just a few more bottles...
A winery shaped by the land, inspired by the sea, and driven by curiosity.
There are, of course, a few complications. Nobody has written a particularly useful manual on building an underwater winery, and the Mediterranean isn't exactly designed with wine logistics in mind.
So we learn as we go, and the sea keeps surprising us. But that's probably what we love most about it.
As featured in
Every bottle protects the Mediterranean
Our cellar sits on the seabed rather than on land, and that one decision shapes how we make our wine and what we give back to the water it comes from.
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The sea does the work
The seabed stays cold and steady all year, so our wine finishes aging without a climate-controlled cellar or the energy one runs on. -
Our cellars grow reefs
The structures that hold our bottles underwater fill with marine life over time, so the cellar adds to the ecosystem instead of drawing from it. -
Built on marine science
A marine biologist co-founded this winery. We work alongside conservation and research groups, and we treat the sea as a partner we answer to. -
Part of every bottle goes back
A share of what we earn returns to protecting Mediterranean waters, so drinking our wine and looking after the sea pull in the same direction.
From the seabed to the table
Dives, harvests, tastings, and the people behind ElixSea.
