The oldest unopened bottle of wine in the world

https://www.openculture.com/2025/08/the-oldest-unopened-bottle-of-wine-in-the-world.html

50•bookofjoe•2d ago

Comments

SomeHacker44•6h ago

...is from 350AD and looks like a bottle of sludge. (To save you a click.)

ZiiS•6h ago

It is a bottle of sludge.

jebarker•4h ago

This cost me a click to ask why did you need to save people the click?

chrismorgan•6h ago

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•6h ago

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•4h ago

If the books are set in 55 BC, how would the characters know it was 55 BC?

GLdRH•4h ago

Well, Caesar was born in 100 BC and they knew how old he was. Simple calculation, really.

bdcravens•4h ago

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)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_urbe_condita

bryanrasmussen•3h ago

I believe this was what people call a "joke"

pimlottc•3h ago

Ceci-la, c’est la blague

lovecg•2h ago

I had a thought once that no one ever lived in year one except retroactively (with some exceptions like the French Revolution). By the time a new system is adopted, it’s already been a while since the defining event.

merelysounds•50m ago

Another possible exception: systems where year one happens repeatedly, e.g. Japanese era calendar scheme.

dfxm12•4h ago

Likely for the same reason they speak modern French.

rwmj•6h ago

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?

ginko•6h ago

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.

margalabargala•24m ago

The means by which the wine would be removed would introduce contaminants.

These contaminants might ruin the wine for whatever purpose they are saving it for.

TylerE•6h ago

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)

j1elo•5h ago

Funny that we can know what's the center of the Sun made of, but who knows what is inside that bottle! :)

GLdRH•4h ago

Are we even sure the sun isn't filled with a "mix of various herbs"?

adonovan•4h ago

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.

jibal•3h ago

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•3h ago

God this is peak HN

TylerE•6h ago

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•5h ago

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•5h ago

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•2h ago

It seems the next time it will be tasted should be sometime in 2130.

Amorymeltzer•4h ago

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."

labanimalster•4h ago

And this is the oldest opened wine: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmona_wine_urn

af78•2h ago

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.

latchkey•1h ago

Who says they wished it?

abdulhaq•44m ago

Then again, plenty of people pickle themselves while alive

4ad•3h ago

> 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?

glitchc•3h ago

No bottle can guarantee an absolute seal. Even a very tiny leak will allow ethanol to evaporate over time.

throwup238•3h ago

> 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.

jibal•3h ago

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.

Merrill•1h ago

An old, unopened bottle of wine is like Schrödinger's cat - it may be alive; it may be dead.

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