The oldest unopened bottle of wine in the world
36 comments
·August 21, 2025labanimalster
af78
My first thought was: what does it taste like? But:
> The vessel contained five liters of wine mixed with the cremains of the deceased and a gold ring at the bottom.
Interesting that someone wished to spend the afterlife in wine.
abdulhaq
Then again, plenty of people pickle themselves while alive
latchkey
Who says they wished it?
chrismorgan
I grew up without liquor around, but with Asterix books. I read of fine vintages like 62 BC. I forgot the stories are set in 55 BC. I assumed good wine was aged for hundreds or thousands of years.
jcla1
Even today it is exceedingly rare to find a still-well-conditioned bottle of wine that has the capability to have aged for 117 years or so. Most often sweet wines are capable of this.
LeftHandPath
If the books are set in 55 BC, how would the characters know it was 55 BC?
GLdRH
Well, Caesar was born in 100 BC and they knew how old he was. Simple calculation, really.
bdcravens
From the future perspective, yes. From the perspective of characters at the time, they wouldn't use that nomenclature, since it didn't exist yet. They would rather use the numbering system of their time (in this case, years since the establishment of Rome)
dfxm12
Likely for the same reason they speak modern French.
Merrill
An old, unopened bottle of wine is like Schrödinger's cat - it may be alive; it may be dead.
Amorymeltzer
A fun read is Benjamin Wallace's The Billionaire's Vinegar. Ostensibly it's about the then-most expensive bottle of wine sold, a bottle supposedly owned by Benjamin Franklin, but it's a good tour through expensive wines and old wines. It's from 2008 so I imagine most of the superlatives are outdated and some of the detecting tech might be improved, but a fine enough read.
Some good lines, perhaps most relevantly: "A truism about mature wines is that there are no great wines, only great bottles."
jibal
The best wine I ever tasted was from a bottle of Montrachet fetched from the cellar of friends of a new girlfriend, saved for a special occasion which apparently was them meeting me, which added a nice glow to it.
rwmj
There's got to be some sort of remote sensing way to tell what it's made of. Mass spectroscopy maybe? Or X-ray scintillation?
TylerE
Kinda feel like you just keep digging at that site until you find the second oldest bottle of wine, and then just open and analyze that one.
(Tongue in cheek, but only partially)
ginko
I feel like they could also probably take a miniscule sample (like a cubic mm) without upsetting things. That should be enough to do all kinds of analysis.
j1elo
Funny that we can know what's the center of the Sun made of, but who knows what is inside that bottle! :)
jibal
Unlike a bottle of wine, the sun is an electromagnetic energy source. Without accessing the wine its chemical composition is unknown. Consider medical diagnostics like MRIs and CT scans ... they detect density and shape, but for a biopsy you need tissue.
t0lo
God this is peak HN
GLdRH
Are we even sure the sun isn't filled with a "mix of various herbs"?
adonovan
Even if you allow "mix" to mean "pressure cook under 250 billion atmospheres at 15 million Kelvin", herbs contains too much carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus to make a G-class star that tastes like our sun. So, yes.
TylerE
I wonder what the oldest unopened bottle is that at least appears to be drinkable is. (i.e. uncorked and at least without olbvious sediment)
n1b0m
The oldest reliably drinkable wine is a white wine from 1472, stored in a 450-liter barrel in the cellars of the Hospices de Strasbourg in France. The wine has only been tasted three times throughout its history:
1576: To celebrate a Swiss alliance.
1718: After a hospital fire.
1944: To commemorate the city's liberation from Nazi occupation.
albumen
The 1576 event was perhaps the earliest example of deliveroo. As part of a major shooting tournament, a delegation from Zurich travelled by boat to deliver a cauldron of hot millet porridge to the city, to prove they could reach Strasbourg swiftly (in just 18 hours) and still keep the porridge warm. This was a diplomatic performance reinforcing the Protestant alliance and mutual support between Strasbourg and Zurich during the Reformation.
deadbabe
It seems the next time it will be tasted should be sometime in 2130.
4ad
> While scientists have considered accessing the liquid to further analyze the content, as of 2024, the bottle has remained unopened because of concerns about how the liquid would react when exposed to air.
...This seems like a trivial non-concern? Just open it in an inert atmosphere?
> While it has reportedly lost its ethanol content
Why, and more importantly how would it lose its ethanol content?
throwup238
> Why, and more importantly how would it lose its ethanol content?
Most wine bottles lose their ethanol within decades because oxygen makes it through the seal and the ethanol evaporates or reacts into something else. Any wine bottle that survives to hundreds of years old, even perfectly sealed, will have bacteria converting ethanol to acetaldehyde and acetic acid via aerobic and anaerobic pathways. 200-300 years is normally the limit before wine loses all ethanol even without a leak.
glitchc
No bottle can guarantee an absolute seal. Even a very tiny leak will allow ethanol to evaporate over time.
SomeHacker44
...is from 350AD and looks like a bottle of sludge. (To save you a click.)
jebarker
This cost me a click to ask why did you need to save people the click?
ZiiS
It is a bottle of sludge.
Wowhappyfun
[dead]
And this is the oldest opened wine: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmona_wine_urn