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Comment by aetherspawn | Hacker News Reader

Can't figure out from the article if the wine inside is consumable (or has leaked out). If not, that would make it maybe the oldest wine in existence, and although disgustingly old and perhaps mildly toxic, it would probably make it very valuable.

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> ...though they’re still far from the oldest unopened bottles of wine in the world. That honor goes to the Speyer wine bottle, a jug of wine that, before its disinterment in contemporary Germany, sat in a Roman tomb for more than 1500 years. The Speyer wine is probably still safe to drink, though scientists say it likely wouldn’t taste good.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/can-wine-survive-shipw...

So the ones from the article are potentially up to seven centuries older.

I suspect the amphoras won't have kept the wine intact for that long; after all, the ship is 2200 years old.

If the wine miraculously remains intact, I suspect the taste wouldn't even be close to what it was back in the day. I wouldn't mind trying a glass of actual Roman wine though.

The ship being ~90m underwater probably matters more. Water pressure at that depth would break the seals on all the amphorae before the wreck even hit the bottom.

Why would that happen? The wine inside the amphorae is an uncompressible liquid.

The seals don't have to be uncompressible, though.

And the amphoras themselves are ceramic and might not be completely tight at those pressures, meaning sea water might be able to get in, and eventually replace the wine. 2200 years is a long time for slow processes to work through ancient clay vessels.

Arr, this wine tastes salty!

https://greekreporter.com/2021/06/12/why-ancient-greeks-mixe...

Look at a (glass) wine bottle - there are a few centimeters of ever-so-compressible air between the top of the wine and the cork. If the Roman wineries did not leave a similar bit of air in their amphorae, then their seals would need to be quite flexible - think of a thermometer bulb, and Rome's lack of controlled-temperature shipping technology.

I'm guessing that glass would cost you circa $10m, if not $100m ? Weird things happen at the very extreme ends of supply and demand. Something this rare only becomes exponentially more valuable as there are more people, which means in theory it makes a great investment. Potentially the greatest investment opportunity that could ever exist, no?

Actually perhaps it would be more valuable than a painting like the Mona Lisa? Why.. well, there are more great artists. But it will never be possible for someone in their own lifetime to attain another 2000 year old bottle of wine. It's simply impossible. Anyone who wanted to plan for such a thing could never live long enough to enjoy it.

Roman wine NFT let's go

Everybody would want to have a piece of that taste, as the existing vines today in Europe were all cross-bread with american vines after the mid 19th century due to the "phylloxera pleague". So there is no way to reconstruct the "original taste" as we use different vine strains today and the original vines are extinct.

When steamboats arose, the shortened travel times resulted in the insects being involuntarily brought to Europe alive where it devasted vine harvests. As a remedy, European viners cross-bread their vines with American vines to obtain resistance. Further read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_French_Wine_Blight

Do we still have the DNA of the original vine strand?

DNA wasn't known during the time of the roman empire (and a long time after that). Today we have seed banks built into permafrost close to the polar circle [0] for exactly that purpose (to store seeds for future generations) - the importance of which I only realized after hearing about sylphium [1] (an herb that was also extinct by the romans but was used as valuable medicine back then - its properties or studies might even benefit our modern society as its reported effects are still a mystery today).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium

To add to this: Don't forget that all of our seeds today are the result of centuries of man-made breeding and selection processes. Mankind did selection and cultivation to achieve wanted properties (higher yields, resilience against plagues/insects, taste properties etc.) and todays strands of seeds are the result of this breeding - the value cannot be stressed enough. Best example is the grapefruit, a fruit that did not exist before the 18th century at which point it was the result of a cross-breed between an orange and a pomelo strain. It was deemed tasty, and that is the only reason why we still have it today.

Disease resistance and environment adaptation is why we need to continue to produce and collect seed as locally as possible.

Another common plant that wouldn't exist without human intervention is what we know as strawberries. The garden strawberry is a cross of a North American and a Chilean Fragaria species.

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

They weren't cross-bred initially. (theres only a few hybrids) They were grafted (and most still are!) to the roots of American vines. The part of the plant the bears the fruit should be similar to the way it once was.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grafting#French_Wine_Pandemic

https://grapes.extension.org/grafting-grape-vines/

That is amazing, didn't know about the grafting. Seems crazy to create this kind of hybrids, especially considering how long this is done by humans. But I still think it will be hard to come by original vines from the roman age, as man tends to cross-breed or select all the time.

An extreme instance of grafting, 40 kinds of fruit from a single tree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_40_Fruit

This article does not support your claim. It says European viners grafted their vines to the roots of American vines. Grafting is not cross breeding. I don't know much about the wine industry, maybe they also did cross breeding as well, but that wikipedia article doesn't mention anything like that.

Genuine question: why might it be toxic?

Possibly lead toxicity. In ancient Rome, for example, a common method to sweeten wine was by adding a syrup created from boiling grape juice in leaded vessels which when heated, spread toxins into the liquid.

I think the tasty addition was lead acetate.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_acetate

I kind of assumed the paint in the vessel or whatever (they probably didn't know about toxicity) would seep into the wine over such a long period of time.

I hadn't thought about the container!

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