The German Palatinate History Museum treasures such a special bottle of wine, this bottle of wine has a history of more than 1600 years, has been the attention of people from all over the world, many tourists come to visit this bottle of the world's oldest known liquid wine, it can be called the treasure of the Palatinate History Museum.
This bottle has a translucent glass bottle with a capacity of 1.5L, through which the presence of the internal liquid can be clearly seen.
The bottle was discovered in 1867, when archaeologists discovered an ancient tomb in Palatinate, Germany, and after identification, the burial time of this ancient tomb was about the 4th century AD. The tomb contains two sarcophagi, one male and one female. When the staff was cleaning up the items, in addition to finding gold and silver jewelry, there were several funerary wine bottles, and amazingly, one of the bottles actually contained a large part of the mysterious liquid.
What exactly is the liquid in the bottle? This question quickly aroused the curiosity of many experts and the public.
Since The Palatinate in Germany has one of the oldest places to grow and make wine, experts have speculated that the liquid in this bottle is wine. But whether it is wine or not, no one can be sure. To know what exactly is in it, you need to open the bottle and analyze the ingredients inside. But since this is after all a bottle with a history of more than 1600 years, the question of whether to open it has been debated by many archaeologists for nearly a century.
Opponents believe that this bottle can not be opened, first of all, once the bottle is opened, the wine inside will soon degenerate once it comes into contact with the outside world, then the bottle of wine will lose the meaning of recording history; in addition, in the process of opening, once the use of too much force, it is likely to break the glass, so keep our curiosity, the bottle of wine is the best way to deal with it in the museum.
Of course, for such a magical bottle, how can it block the curiosity of all archaeologists, so someone called in a chemist to analyze this unknown liquid. Of course, it is not to open the bottle to extract the liquid inside for analysis, but to analyze some residues of the bottle mouth. After testing, it was found that the bottle was indeed a bottle of wine, and there was also some olive oil attached to the surface of the bottle mouth.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="10" >why is the wine in the bottle still alive after 1600 years? </h1>
Supposedly, a bottle of wine has been steamed dry anyway after more than a thousand years. This is actually related to the special packaging method of this bottle of wine. The sealing method of ordinary wine is mainly through wooden stoppers, because the wine is very special, it can not be completely in contact with the air during the fermentation process, because this will quickly oxidize the internal substances, and the wine after oxidation will have a sour feeling of vinegar. But it's best to have a little contact with oxygen, which helps the wine to age and mature, producing more rich flavors.
People have chosen many kinds of stoppers to seal the bottle, and through comparison, they found that cork stoppers are the most suitable. The reason is that the cork has the characteristics of soft and elasticity, it has many fine small holes, when it is used to seal the bottleneck, the cork cork and the wine contact will expand up, plug the gap of the bottleneck, prevent the wine leakage; at the same time, the wine can also contact the trace amount of air through the micropores of the cork itself, to achieve the purpose of breathing and development, and continue to complete its maturation process after bottling.
This bottle of 1600-year-old wine can be preserved to this day, mainly because this bottle of wine uses wax seals. Because the wax itself is not easy to be oxidized, and the air tightness is high, due to the use of wax and olive oil to seal the bottle, it can maintain such a long period of closure, which also allows the wine in the bottle to be preserved to this day.
For this bottle of wine, many people may still have a question, that is, how could there be a glass bottle more than 1600 years ago?
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="24" > has there really been a technology for making glass for more than a thousand years? </h1>
We need to know that in fact, glass is not a product of modern times, in fact, human beings have long been making glass. According to records, the earliest glass originated in Mesopotamia, as early as 3500 BC, when the craftsmen living in the current Syrian region were smelting metal, they found that when some quartz-rich ore was mixed with soda, when heated to 1000 degrees, it would flow out into a translucent paste, and when it cooled down, it formed a smooth and transparent solid, which is glass. So at that time, people would use glass to make some simple shape decorative accessories and packaging devices.
Glass bottles made in the roman period
Then in 200 BC, the technology of glass blowing was born, people by extending an iron pipe into the melted glass liquid, at the other end of the mouth to blow, you can create a more complex shape of glass devices, so it is not surprising that there can be glass bottles before 1600, but at that time people's firing technology is relatively rough, the burned glass is generally colorful or more turbid and translucent. From this picture of glass bottles from 1600 years ago, it can also be seen that these glasses have more impurities and the color is not very uniform, which is very in line with the technical conditions at that time.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="27" > last</h1>
This unopened bottle of wine is still preserved in the German Palatinate History Museum, this bottle of historic wine is still attracting many tourists to visit, for this bottle of wine open or not open the question, is still in the debate, some experts believe that through the analysis of the composition of this bottle of wine can let us better understand the history of winemaking at that time, which is also a way to witness history. So for this question, do you think it is open or not?