It’s snowing again in Seattle.  The third major snowfall in four days.  I realize that a lot of the rest of the country is getting it worse than we are right now, but 12 inches of snow in a season is unheard of here, to get that much in four days is just crazy.  Anyway, it reminded me of the strangest wine storage I’d ever heard of.

A few years ago my father and I took a once-in-a-lifetime fishing trip to the northern tip of Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories in Canada.  It was a starkly beautiful place, a hundred or so miles north of the Arctic Circle.  On the lake we fished for Lake Trout (most of the world records have been caught here, and the fishing was truly amazing) and we took a two-day trip further north to the Tree River in Nunavut, to fish for Arctic Char.  The fishing was amazing, and the terrain was stark and beautiful, but what really caught my attention was the wine (of course) they were serving in the dining hall in the stark, but surprising comfortable lodge we were staying at (Plummer’s Artic Lodge). 

Most of the bottles didn’t have labels.  When I asked one of the staff why, expecting a conspiracy not to acknowledge the American provenance of the bottles, she told me a great, true, story.   The winter there lasts from 7 - 9 months (we were there in August and the ice had only been off the lake for 3 weeks), and the temperatures regularly stay below -30 Fahrenheit.  Because the lodge is so remote (100’s of miles from the nearest road), getting supplies in and out is very difficult.  So everything that can stay over the winter does.  Mind you, the power and heat are off, and there are no people there, and the temperature in the buildings equalizes with the outdoor temperature quickly.  -30 is plenty cold enough to freeze wine and shatter the bottles (and just about everything else). 

The solution is to put all of the wine  in cleaned out metal fuel barrels, and sink them to the bottom the lake.  The ice on the lake doesn’t get deeper than ten feet, so sinking the barrels in 15 feet of water is adequate.  The water is fresh, so it doesn’t get below +32 Fahrenheit, and is the warmest place for hundreds of miles.  Though I wouldn’t recommend this for anything fancy or valuable, it’s a pretty elegant solution.