The oldest unopened bottle of wine in the world | Hacker News Reader

The oldest unopened bottle of wine in the world

openculture.com

62 pointsbookofjoe43 comments

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

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.

Who says they wished it?

As it's the first time I read about mixing wine with cremated remains I thought it was not a widespread funerary practice. So it looked to me like a request the person may have made before dying. But yeah, just a guess.

Then again, plenty of people pickle themselves while alive

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.

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.

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

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

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

I believe this was what people call a "joke"

Ceci-la, c’est la blague

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.

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

> with some exceptions like the French Revolution

It was also the case for the French Revolution. The republican calendar was established in year II. Nobody living in year I knew it at the time.

Likely for the same reason they speak modern French.

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."

Old wine is a beautiful thing. I've mentioned this on HN before, but wine is a lot hardier than most people think and it is quite possible to age many wines for a century at home. There are many factors that influence whether a wine can be reliably aged - too many to list in a comment - but if you buy a bottle of Vintage Port, Madeira, or Sauternes, it will be enjoyable for decades at the very least.

If anyone here is curious about old wine and wants to drink some together - my email is in my profile.

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?

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.

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.

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)

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

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

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.

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.

God this is peak HN

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.

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)

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.

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.

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

It has actually been drank at least once more, by two French oenologists in 1994:

>La verdeur du vieillard En 1994, une analyse du vin de 1472 a été réalisée par deux oenologues, MM. Lobre et Windholtz, prouvant « que c’est encore du vin » et non pas « une mixture bonne à assaisonner » une batavia. Le nez a été jugé « puissant, très fin et d’une grande complexité ». En bouche, ils ont relevé des notes de vanille, de miel, de cire, de camphre et de noisette. Alors qu’un « vin normal » possède 20 g d’extraits secs, celui des hospices strasbourgeois dépasse les 45 g ! Conclusion : « Ce vieillard a conservé une étonnante verdeur », 538 ans après sa naissance.

from https://web.archive.org/web/20131103183014/https://www.lalsa...

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

> 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?

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

> 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.

Which bring to mind those bottles of Napoleon era champagne found preserved under pressure in a ship wreck. Any info on how those turned out or was the one opened a palatable vinegar?

Perhaps with a dash of cobalt-60 we can ensure both a long shelf-life and discourage premature opening.

Sorry, your comment is bullshit.

>Most wine bottles lose their ethanol within decades

Not true at all, even for bottles sealed with cheap, short corks, or bottles that leak. One delicious example is 1977 Vintage Port, which is notorious for faulty corks. Roughly speaking, 1/3 to 1/2 of corks failed even with good storage. And yet - the port inside is still in near-perfect shape, alcohol intact. Indeed, I just opened another bottle of '77 Dow's the night before last, and it was flawless.

>200-300 years is normally the limit before wine loses all ethanol even without a leak.

Also entirely untrue - I have wine in that age range as well :) And once again, some of it has leaked, and once again, the alcohol remained intact...

If you don't believe me, I recommend looking up tasting notes for old wines. There are plenty of datapoints on this particular subject. Or, you could buy a bottle! Vintage Port with fifty years on it isn't terribly expensive for the quality and age of wine you're buying.

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

It is a bottle of sludge.

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

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