rare piece of history that would be priced at astronomical price points but with an unappetizing scent is stored in a German historical museum that states that this is the world’s oldest unopened bottle of wine. The bottle is estimated to be from the year 325 and produced by the Romans, which would explain why it was found in Germany.
It is absolutely astonishing how many wars this wine has survived, and what is even more interesting is the bottle that it comes in, which sort of justifies its age as well as origin. But the better question is, how did it manage to go so many years without being opened?
Can it still be consumed?
As it can clearly be seen, the wine has transformed into a more solid form, scientists presume that this is a possible manifestation of ethanol within the wine or maybe a strange ingredient used by the Romans to give flavor to the wine which is now having a bad reaction. Besides its terrible appearance, scientists assume that the wine is drinkable ( in other words it won’t kill you) but don’t expect a fruitful taste.
I said an assumption, as the museum won’t allow researchers to open the bottle to analyze the content inside. In many cases, most of the wine would have evaporated many years ago, but due to the hermetic seal created by the wax cap as well as the olive oil on top, the wine has managed to “survive” or at least take a very different form.
If the most expensive bottle of wine is a 1947 French Cheval Blanc which sells for around $300,000, I wonder how much would a 325 Romerwein au Speyer go for. If not for consuming purposes, at least to buy it in order to brag that you are the owner of the oldest bottle of wine in the world, however, make sure to only show the receipt and not the actual content within the bottle.
All jokes aside, it is still phenomenal how a meaningless object, let alone a bottle of wine, can survive for so many years. Roman history reports that they did indeed make the best wine, and this is not necessarily because of the technique they used or any other secrets, but because of their extraordinary grapes. It is hard to tell but researchers assume that this wine was red due to its solid, red content.
This bottle was apparently found It was found near the town of Speyer, Germany, in 1867. Records say that the bottle even looked as bad as it looks today.
If you want to have a closer look at this bottle, it is displayed at the Museum of the Palatinate in Germany. As mentioned previously, it is not about the content within the bottle, but about the bottle itself and how many centuries it managed to survive without being damaged.
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