The oldest unopened bottle of wine in the world (openculture.com)

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

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.

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 wonder what the oldest unopened bottle is that at least appears to be drinkable is. (i.e. uncorked and at least without olbvious sediment)

[dead]

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 It's from 2008 so I imagine most of the superlatives are outdated and some of the detecting tech might be improved, but a fine enough read.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."

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

> 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?

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.

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

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.