Venice's lagoon wineries mike peters

Michel Thoulouze's top wine might not impress you at first glance.

The bottle looks a bit worse for wear-in fact, it looks like he just fetched it from the trash. The glass seems a bit filmy, and there are small white scabs here and there that look like some kind of calcified mineral deposit.

"That's exactly right," the Frenchman says, as we chat at his lagoonside winery on Venice's outlying island of San Erasmo. Thoulouze says his Orto winery is the only one with onsite production from grape-growing all the way to bottling. His premium label is literally aged in the nearby lagoon, where he tucks bottles into a sunken boat and lets them mature underwater in the cool darkness.