I'll drink to that where we get behind the scenes of the beverage business.

I'm Levy Dalton.

I'm Erin Scala and here's our show today. Oh, Have you ever walked across the Brooklyn Bridge?

Well, if you have, and you've stood on the Manhattan side,

did you know that you were standing on top of an old wine cellar.

Under the Manhattan anchor of the Brooklyn Bridge

lies the Blue Grotto. An expansive storage space rented to wine merchants to

help fund the bridge. Why? Because the temperature and

humidity of the underground space was great for wine storage and the bridge

operations earned $5,000 a year from the Manhattan vaults alone in 1901.

During prohibition, the storage cleared out and it was used as storage by a newspaper company,

but soon after prohibition was repealed, it once again became a wine storage

facility, though today it is used by the Transportation Department. Cool, humid, underground and underwater chambers are excellent environments for storing alcohol products, sometimes unwittingly. In 1997, bottles of 1907 champagne were found by a diver.

The battles were destined for the Russian royal family, but they sank on a ship in 1916 and they sold for over a quarter

million dollars each.

In 2010, dozens of bottles of champagne were found in the Baltic Sea, supposedly aged in perfect conditions, cool

temperatures, darkness, and pressure. The bottles were about 170 years old.

Now perhaps inspired by some of these underwater finds, by 2008

winemakers in Crozermitage, Champagne, Muscidae, and Burgundy were all

experimenting with underwater aged wine. Today wineries around the

world are trying ocean and sea-aged wines.

Aside from having novelty value, underwater storing is a great use of free temperature-controlled space.

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