This May Be The Oldest Drinkable Wine In The World

Wine always gets better with age — until it doesn't. If you ever find yourself in Speyer, Germany, you might want to drop by the Historisches Museum der Pfalz, a 100-plus-year-old structure with about 1 million artifacts in its collection. Among them is a yellow-green bottle containing a glob of olive oil, solidified by the passage of time into a clumpy, discolored mess floating above a cloudy liquid. The substance at the bottom may be the world's oldest drinkable wine, with an astounding vintage of A.D. 325 to 350.

The bottle was discovered in a tomb in Palatinate in 1867, one of Germany's biggest wine-growing regions. Some believe the nobleman buried in the tomb was a Roman legionnaire, and the wine was buried with him according to custom. Ancient Romans used to preserve their wine by pouring a thick layer of olive oil over it; the oil acted as a sealant to prevent oxidation and evaporation. It clearly worked with the Speyer bottle, leaving us with one of the world's oldest liquid wines — although you probably want to use a different storage hack to save opened red wine today. What's even more impressive is the wine is technically still drinkable, if a little flat. While the oil kept the liquid safe to drink on a microbiological level — meaning it shouldn't make you sick — researchers believe all its ethanol is gone, rendering it non-alcoholic. At this point, you might be better off making a cocktail from boxed wine.

The bottle has never been opened due to concerns about what the air might do to it, opening up questions about what it might taste like. Since there have been no chemical analyses done on its flavor to date, we can only go by what historical records of ancient Roman wine tell us.

To start, Romans didn't strictly differentiate between red and white wine, so it's difficult to compare it to modern varietals (you should avoid ordering wine by the color anyway). We do know, however, that their fermentation process allowed yeast to grow on the surface. This led to the chemical compound sotolon developing in the wine, imparting notes of maple syrup, clover, and tobacco at certain concentrations. Experts believe this led to Roman wine having sweet, fruity flavors with an olfactory profile that includes toast, nuts, and dried fruit. It's also possible that the Speyer wine may have had honey or herbs mixed in for flavor, as was the practice back then.

Truth is, we may never know how exactly the Speyer wine tastes — which only adds to its mystique. It's technically not even the oldest liquid wine in existence. A 2019 discovery in Carmona, Spain, unearthed an urn containing an older, similarly safe-to-drink wine. However, given the cremated remains of its owner were mixed into the liquid, it's safe to say the Speyer bottle is the oldest surviving drinkable wine.