It's mostly a watery mix of water and some alchool with a touch of old basement smell.
And that's the best wines that had enough sugar to be fermented into alchool and not turn into vinegar.
Now, what would be the oldest enjoyable wine? The oldest that we have any record of anyone enjoying was the 1540 Steinwein, drank at age 421 in 1961 by Hugh Johnson, who took notes: "...We were able to take about two sips of the centuries-old substance, before it died of exposure to the air, gave up its spirit." [0] This is actually common in wines that are past their peak - a brief moment of life before they die forever from the air. One bottle remains but with the notes by Johnson I imagine that the wine will die before it is next tasted; it is "on loan from the Simon family from London."
With time, I expect the record for oldest enjoyable wine to be taken by either madeira (possibly from 1715) or the Rüdesheimer wine from 1653; in 2013, Edwin Vos from Christie's sampled a 1715 JCA & C Terrantez bottle and called it "remarkably youthful and surprisingly sweet." The last person to try the 1653 Rüdesheimer wine was Queen Elisabeth, I can't find her tasting notes :)
For the casual drinker, who wants to drink old wines at home, good options are madeira, port and sauternes. Even if the bottles are past their drinking window, they will still be enjoyable.
[0] https://www.buergerspital.de/wineestate/1540-steinwein/index...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-...
This is remarkable to me. What a find! Am I alone in being super, super surprised that it remained in liquid form this long? Does that suggest a very perfect seal on the urn?
Or the temperature dropped enough for it to stop evaporating.
In a small village of Salamanca, when the temperature outside was around 30C, inside a cellar/basement it would perfectly be at 18 or even 16C depending on the corner.
Also, being underground (or semi-underground under a separate room from the house) was an advantage on wars against pillage or further bombings.
Under the Spanish right-wing dictatorship, a lot of people had banned magazines and books well kept under/inside basement trunks, relatively hidden from the usual rooms at home, as most people would just think of a basement as a room to store old junk, ripped clothes, photos, family related letters or broken hardware. And a bunch of food, maybe.
Rural Spain's homes were built on thick walls often made from stone bricks, they isolated from both heat and cold, which can drop below 0 with ease at Winter on non-coastal zones and reach up to 40C temps at Summer.
Nitpick! The Civil War; Spain was not grounds for any of the two World Wars so they are not relevant events to be survived.
(I bet you know this, but hey, a little pedantry a day keeps the readers engaged)
Direct link if anyone was curious
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/59131/pg59131-images.ht...
- "THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE FRUIT-TREES"
- "The nature of the vine. Its mode of fructification | The nature of the grape, and the cultivation of the vine | Ninety-one varieties of the vine | Remarkable facts connected with the culture of the vine | The most ancient wines | The nature of wines | Fifty kinds of generous wines | Thirty-eight varieties of foreign wine | Seven kinds of salted wines | Eighteen varieties of sweet wine. Raisin-wine and hepsema | Three varieties of second-rate wine | At what period generous wines were first commonly made in Italy | The inspection of wine ordered by King Romulus | Wines drunk by the ancient Romans | Some remarkable facts connected with wine-lofts. The Opimian wine | At what period four kinds of wine were first served at table | The uses of the wild vine. What juices are naturally the coldest of all | Sixty-six varieties of artificial wine | Hydromeli, or melicraton | Oxymeli | Twelve kinds of wine with miraculous properties | What wines it is not lawful to use in the sacred rites | How must is usually prepared | Pitch and resin | Vinegar—lees of wine | Wine-vessels—wine-cellars | Drunkenness | Liquors with the strength of wine made from water and corn"
In addition, the 0.14 mg/L figure reported in the paper is at a similar level to the current safety standard. The International Organization of Vine and Wine (OIV), an intergovernmental agency comprised of 45 international member states, has a current maximum acceptable limit of 0.15 mg/L for Pb in wine starting from the 2007 harvest year.
https://www.oiv.int/public/medias/3741/e-code-annex-maximum-...
