Posted on 09/06/2018 10:56:14 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Several times during my lifetime, bottles of wine with some great age on them have been opened with a lot of publicity and hoopla. To my knowledge, not one was drinkable.
In one of the links above, maybe the source story, there's a woeful tale of a bottle of wine valued at $100s of $1000s, and the would-be seller accidentally knocked it over onto the floor. Gone. Another problem that started to get larger during the uptick in baby boomer wine collecting was fakes.
OTOH, the head of the Rothschild family recounted (on 60 minutes, maybe?) how he'd been dining, in Scotland of all places, and ordered the house wine, and one sip, it was the best wine he'd ever tasted. What is this wine? Just our house wine. It was a 200 or so year old Rothschild, apparently this was a posh place.
My vote is not to open it. It’s a remarkable artifact and we already know quite a lot about ancient winemaking techniques.
Unless someone can demonstrate significant potential value in opening it.
I worked for a wine importer in NYC during my college years. They bought a recently discovered wine cellar that had four or five stories going down into the bedrock of the island not too far from Columbus Circle. The temperature was constant year around. The company used it for a warehouse for their wine and liquors.
Apparently the original owners had also been smugglers because there was also a tunnel that went down to the Hudson river. Anyway at the very bottom story where you had to climb down a ladder several large bottles of port ??? were found all covered with dust from the centuries. I dont know if they ever sold them or opened them.
Old port, interesting; there was a lot of Portuguese maritime activity in the upper eastern seaboard after the disaster at the Battle of Alcacer Quibir; a Canadian folksinger (either the late Stan Rogers, or Garnet Rogers, his brother) if memory serves mentioned that the town where they grew up was founded in that time frame (1578 or sometime not long thereafter) by Portuguese shipwreck survivors. After Portugal lost the flower of its nobility at that battle, Spain subsumed both Portugal itself and its overseas possessions into the ruling dynasty's possessions. Portuguese ships and sailors who didn't care to live under Spanish rule stayed out of Spanish territory, and made like wild geese into other parts of the world. That wasn't always easy -- those Kings of Spain were, for a few generations, rulers of more of the world's surface than anyone in history.
Maybe the opening of the bottle can be integrated into the next National Treasure sequel. ;^)
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