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The Speyer Wine Bottle: The Roman Wine Nobody Dares to Open

Famous Bottles · 2026-11-11

Photo: Gundolf Lange on Unsplash

Sealed around AD 325 and buried with a Roman couple, the Speyer bottle still holds liquid after some 1,700 years, and its museum has never dared to pull the cork.

In 1867 workers digging near Speyer, an old Rhineland town in what is now the Pfalz wine region of Germany, opened a Roman tomb dating from the 4th century. Inside lay two stone sarcophagi, one for a man and one for a woman, surrounded by the things a wealthy Roman family thought the dead might need. Among them was a glass bottle that would become one of the most famous objects in the history of wine.

The two burials held a small cellar's worth of glassware: six vessels with the woman and ten with the man. Most were empty or broken. One, however, still held liquid, and that is the bottle known today as the Speyer wine bottle, or Römerwein aus Speyer. Archaeologists date it to roughly AD 325 to 350, which makes its contents around 1,700 years old.

It is a handsome thing even before you think about what is in it. The bottle is made of yellow-green glass, holds about one and a half litres, has shoulders shaped a little like an amphora and two handles moulded in the form of dolphins. Glass that thin rarely survives the centuries, which is part of why this find is so remarkable.

The real trick was in how it was sealed. Whoever filled it poured in a modest amount of wine flavoured with herbs, then topped it with a much larger layer of olive oil, and finished it with hot wax. The oil kept air away from the wine, and over time it hardened into a dense, resin-like mass that now fills about two-thirds of the bottle. Below it sits a pale, clear liquid. Analysis suggests that at least part of this was once wine, although every trace of alcohol has long gone.

So why has nobody tasted it? The bottle has stayed sealed in the Historical Museum of the Palatinate in Speyer, where it is a star of the wine museum section. Scientists have debated opening it for study, but nobody can be sure how the contents would react to fresh air after so many centuries, and the museum has preferred caution. Researchers who have commented on it think it is probably not dangerous to drink, just extremely unpleasant.

For well over a century it was celebrated as the oldest wine still in liquid form. That changed in 2024, when scientists at the University of Córdoba confirmed that a glass funerary urn found in 2019 in a Roman tomb at Carmona, near Seville, still held wine from the 1st century AD, around three centuries older. Speyer remains the oldest known sealed bottle of wine, and it is still the more famous of the two.

If you visit, the same museum also keeps centuries-old Franconian wines from the Bavarian royal cellars, including a Steinwein labelled 1540. To toast the Romans who planted vines along the Rhine, open a dry Riesling from the Pfalz, the warm, sunny region right on Speyer's doorstep. Look for ripe peach and citrus with a stony, mineral finish, and be grateful you do not need to cut through a layer of olive oil to reach it.

Sources

• Speyer wine bottle – Wikipedia
• The Roman Wine of Speyer – Wines of Germany (Deutsches Weininstitut)
• You Can (Probably) Still Drink the World's Oldest Bottle of Wine – Atlas Obscura
• Carmona: the world's oldest surviving wine – World of Fine Wine
• Old wines from the Royal Bavarian Court Cellar – Historisches Museum der Pfalz (museum-digital)

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