2,000 barnacle-covered wine bottles worth hundreds of thousands of dollars destroyed after California company illegally aged them in the ocean

• Around 2,000 bottles of wine were destroyed after a wine firm was found to be aging them illegally.
• The firm sank crates of wine a mile off the coast of Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara's DA office said.

A wine company was forced to hand over around 2,000 bottles of wine and other alcohol to be destroyed after it was found to be illegally aging its products in the ocean.

Through their company Ocean Fathoms, Emanuele Azzaretto and Todd Hahn began placing crates of wine underwater in 2017, Santa Barbara's District Attorney's office said in a statement.

The pair would sink crates of wine around a mile off the "environmentally sensitive" Santa Barbara coast, the statement says.

"They left each crate on the sea floor for one year, just long enough for a reef ecosystem to develop in the crates and on the bottles. After a year, the crates were removed, along with the sea life living in them," the press release reads.

They would then sell the wine for up to $500 a bottle, it adds.

Ocean Fathoms' website says that each of its bottles is covered in "barnacles, coral, sea shells and ornate hard-shelled tubes formed by annelida sea worms," and it provides photos appearing to show some examples.

A promotional video on the winemaker's website also provides a more detailed look at Ocean Fathoms' process, which the federal Food and Drug Administration found left the wine "adulterated, and not fit for human consumption, because it was submerged in the ocean and potentially contaminated," per the press release.

The disposal of the bottles was part of a plea agreement reached with Azzaretto, Hahn, and Ocean Fathoms. They pled guilty to the misdemeanour criminal charges of "illegally discharging material into waters of the United States, selling alcohol without a license, and aiding and abetting investor fraud," the statement says.

The DA's office said the wine was disposed of at one of Santa Barbara's wastewater treatment plants, while the bottles were to be recycled.

Hahn bragged to the Santa Barbara Independent last month that he had only received a $145 fine, adding that he thought the amount of public resources and funds that had been used on the case was "a joke."

But the press release said the value of the destroyed bottles was likely in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In response to an inquiry from Insider, Ocean Fathoms said that it intended to release a statement on the news shortly.