The world’s oldest wine bottle is believed to date back to AD 325 and was found near the town of Speyer, Germany, in 1867. It is believed to be the oldest unopened bottle of wine in the world, the glass bottle carries 1.5 litres of liquid. The bottle was discovered during an excavation within a 4th-century AD Roman nobleman’s tomb which contained two sarcophagi, one holding the body of a man and one a woman.

It’s believed the man was a Roman legionnaire and that the wine was a provision for his celestial journey. Of the six glass bottles in the woman’s sarcophagus and the ten vessels in the man’s sarcophagus, only one still contained a liquid. While the liquid had lost all of its ethanol content, analysis is consistent with at least part of the liquid having been wine.

It is likely that the wine was produced in the same region and was diluted with a mixture of herbs. and preserved with a large amount of thick olive oil which had been added to the bottle to seal the wine off from air, along with a hot wax seal.