What is the oldest wine in the world?

Speyer, Germany’s Historical Museum of the Palatinate houses the world’s oldest known bottle of wine. In 1867, during the excavation of the grave of a Roman nobleman and woman in the area now known as Speyer, the bottle was discovered.

The couple supposedly purchased the 1.5-liter bottle (a Magnum in the modern wine bottle sizing system) to take with them to the afterlife. The astonishing age of the bottle is put at 325 C.E. or nearly 1,700 years.

Archaeologists digging at the site of the ancient Roman city of Novaesium came across the bottle. The fact that the bottle was discovered in the tomb of a prominent Roman couple lends credence to the theory that it was made for use in the afterlife. Because the tomb was sealed and undisturbed for centuries, the bottle was able to remain intact.

The clay container is equipped with a handy carry handle and a narrow neck for easy pouring. The label claims the wine inside is Falernian, a rare and highly regarded vintage from ancient Rome.

Grapes of the “Aminea” variety, thought to be the ancestor of the modern “Aglianico,” would have been used to produce the wine.

Many would like to know if the contents of the bottle are still drinkable, but there is no simple answer to this question. It’s highly unlikely that the “wine” inside the bottle is actually wine, but rather an alcoholic beverage that has since lost its potency.

Is it still drinkable?

There are two reasons to believe that the liquid is drinkable.

First, the bottle was sealed with wax rather than cork, which would have degraded over the nearly two thousand years the wine was stored. Second, the wine was preserved thanks to the olive oil seal. It’s worth noting, though, that the liquid inside the bottle probably wouldn’t taste very good by this point, having lost its original aroma and flavor.

This wine bottle dates back to the Roman era, and its discovery provides a fascinating window into the past and attests to the ancient Romans’ ingenuity. They figured out how to preserve wine so well that a bottle of it has been sitting on a shelf for nearly two millennia. The bottle is now a popular tourist attraction at the Historical Museum of the Palatinate in Speyer, Germany, where it has been on display since the 1970s.