The oldest wine is in Strasbourg

In this cellar, a barrel of the vintage 1472 Cave Historique des Hospices de Strasbourg (Alsace)
Strasbourg is certainly a special town, and I think it owes its uniqueness to the fact that it was for a long time part of a cluster of free towns (Freien Städten) along the Rhine valley, a region where free ideas and intellectual creativity as well as commerce could flow unabated. A free Imperial city in 1262, it probably gained from being out of reach of French kings and rulers, and I like to think that something remains of this positioning between the Germanic sphere and the French one. Strasbourg was also among the towns where Rudolf Steiner gave many lectures, had an understanding following here because of certain freedom of thought, and this is where he met Albert Schweizer, a prominent Alsatian of that time. In short, I'm proud of the city that I consider as my home town, and returning to the Heimat and visiting my friends there is always a pleasure.

But Strasbourg is also home to what is possibly the oldest wine on earth, not counting the ones still sleeping (in a probably diluted form) in the bottom of the seas in the remains of Roman-ships hulls. This old wine resting in a cellar in Strasbourg was made in the year 1472, a year which it is good to remind it was 20 years exactly before Christopher Columbus sailed to a still-unknown destination.
The treasure sits in an old cellar under the majestic Hospices de Strasbourg (hospital), this cellar being older than the building above it (pictured onthe right), as it has been built between 1393 and 1395...
There's a long history of friendship between the hospices and wine, the best known case being the Hospices de Beaune. Everybody was making wine at the time, including the religious orders, and wine as well as parcels was a commodity that helped pay for the expenses of the hospital, many patients having little coin money but lots of liquid one...
Hugh Johnson wrote in The History of Wine that in 15th-century Germany, the yearly consumption was 120 liters a year per inhabitant, and that doctors and patients alike were drinking 7 liters a day (maybe different wines from our modern ones)...

Another view of the cellar The vinous activity of the Hospices de Strasbourg lasted several centuries, even after the original building was destroyed by a fire in 1716, a fire in which only the cellar, the bakery and the choir of the Chapelle Saint Ehrard went out unscathed (do we have to see a symbol here ?). The patients like in Beaune used to give parcels to the hospital as payment or sign of gratitude, and in the 18th century, the Hospital of Strasbourg was the largest Domaine in alsace, making and selling wine as a side business. Patients used to get 2 liters of wine a day.
It's only somewhere along the 20th century that this wine business was somehow discontinued (it's not clear when exactly), But it was brought back to life in 1997 thanks to motivated Alsatian winegrowers. The cellaring and wine sales were restarted in this very ancient cellar, complete with a wine shop (pictured on left), and the place was opened for visitors who wanted both to buy wine and see by themselves the élevage the wines in these beautiful big wooden vessels.

The Cave des Hospices de Strasbourg sits in the middle of the Hopital de Strasbourg also known as CHU de Strasbourg, a town within the town just south of the historic quarter of La Petite France. Anyway Strasbourg is not a large town, all can be covered by foot or on bicycle, and my walk from near Allée de la Robertsau where I was staying took me 25 minutes maybe, with in the way a great view over the Ill river.
Finding the door or rather the stairs going down to the cellar when in the hospital area was more tricky, but I just asked someone before venturing deeper in the complex, and I was pointed the right building (the one on the right at the top of the page). You don't have to enter the building, the stairs to the cellar are right along the building on the front. This press is dating from 1727 And one more thing to note : this museum-like cellar is free, there's no entry fee and you really feel like if you immersed yourself in an other era, complete with the humid small of this ageless cellar. The floor itsel wears the patina of time, with a paving made of large stones of different sizes. I went there on a monday morning and believe it or not, I was alone all the time there, I just came through another visitor with a camera who was leaving the cellar and looking at the bottles in the shop when I walked in. See the opening hours on this page. You can be toured as a group for a fee, and you can also have a tasting organized in the cellar.

The press is worth to look at, it was made in 1727 out of an oak tree that was 500 years old when it was cut down. Its shape reminds me the Mystical Press of which I reproduced an image in my story about wine in the Middle Ages.
Near the press there are also a few winery tools of various interest, including pumps (pic on right) Stairs to the cellar The cellar open to the visitors is basically a very long room something like 100 meter long) which is wider on one end (the one with the press). Walking up and and down the main alley, you can look at all these different large-capacity barrels (foudres in French) which date from different periods.
At one point along the alley, you can see a flight of stairs leading to the surface, these are not the the ones you use to visit the cellar, but it was __and still is__ certainly used for the inflow and outflow of all the barrels that transited through these blessed cellars. An opening This cellar is an architectural wonder, with efficiency and simplicity going hand to hand. This could go through centuries of neglect but buildings at that time were thought like that, few maintenance and very long life span, especially if there was no wood part.
Here is an opening for the aeration of the underground cellar. It could also have been a passageway to pump wine into or out of the cellar. Remember that the Hospices de Strasbourg was the biggest winery of Alsace in the 18th century... Filtration machine Walking by a filtration machine (Sfoggiatech), we're reminded that this is again a winery in activity. Here is how it works : 30 wineries got together for this project and formed a SICA (Société d'Intérêt Collectif Agricole), and created a partnership in the long term with the Strasbourg Hospital. The deal is that these Alsatian wineries from all the sub-regions of Alsace bring their best wines in the hospital cellar to have them go through an élevage of 6 months to 10 months in the 50 foudres of the Cave Historique. After the élevage, the bottling takes place here in the cellar and each winegrower recovers most of his wine except for a small percentage of bottles which he leaves to the Hospital and which will be sold in the shop located in the cellar. The revenues from these sales contribute to the financing of medical tools.
This is not a full resurection of the winery-in-hospital concept, but still a good way in-between. There's no undesired wood impact on the wines because these are large wooden vessel and because these wooden vats are old.
Some 150 000 bottles go through this cellar every year, and the benefits for the hospital amount to tens of thousands of euros every year. Unidentified bell I don't know why there was a bell stored on a pallet in a corner of the cellar, it might have to do with the renovation of a chapel in the Hospices de Strasbourg, or the renovation of a non-religious building where this medium-size bell had a precise function in the past. But I'm pretty sure they're not using the bell to give special vibes to the wine during its élevage. Cellar pillar Architects will find inspiration in this cellar, and a non-specialist like me still looked at this pillar and harmonious vaulted cellar with awe. You don't need to have learnt the science of building to understand that this cellar is magnificent and very smartly designed.
Notice the tables where I guess tastings can be organized on command for groups or other paying guests. Getting closer to the vintage 1472 The Holy Grail When you walk to the end of the cellar, you find a gate with a handful of relatively smaller foudres some of them being more or less the size of a regular barrel, but with a more ancient shape and architecture. One of these barrels contains the wine from 1472. There's no indication whatsoever and I feel like in a certain movie when the hero had to choose from many different types of chalice whith his fate on the balance. Would I pass the test ? The foudre in the middle I first looked at the larger foudre in the middle, but soon realized that the staves were loose here and there, you could almost see through. But it was a nice old foudre and the few lines in old German displayed on the front were inspiring...

Liebe Freund, Ich Thue Euch hier mit Kund Hier liegt ein Wein um diese Stund Der Wuchs, sag ich, gewiss und wahr Als man Zählet 1472 Jahr Kam er in das Spital hinein Da der Burgunder Krieg ist gesein.

Two smaller foudres Then my attention was caught by the two smaller foudres on the left. I call them foudres because their design is similar to a foudre, but their volume is obviously smaller, very similar to a regular barrel. These ones look very old, and again, especially as there is no other visitor in the cellar, I feel like if I was an archeologist discovering a forgotten temple with mysterious vessels containing a supernatural beverage inside... The one on the left bears the inscription 1519 and the one on the right 1472... Here rests the oldest wine in barrel (1472) So, here it is, the oldest wine on earth, at least in a barrel or a foudre. The wine has been continuously in this barrel since 1472, from what I understand. It has always been taken care of, particularly topped up (currently one bottle added every three months). This is a white Alsatian wine, and experts have taken sample for analysis and against all odds, this is still wine, not vinegar. It has been tasted very few times in the recent history, one of the last time this 15th-century wine was tasted, it was by the General Leclerc when Alsace was liberated in 1944. The wine was more recently analysed by two enologists from the DGCCRF (the French wine police that sometimes harasses winegrowers in less-glamorous operations...) and they found that the white wine (which sports a modest 9,4 % in alcohol) has a very complex nose and many subtle aromas. And the mouth was full with a good length.
More recently, Damien Steyer a young startup founder with a new analysis tool found out that the wine had 70 aromatic components, among which eucalyptus, clove, coconut, camphr and thyme.

Here is the document printed by the DGCCRF on october 5 1994 where the wine experts compare the result of this vintage 1472 with a modern wine__1992 or 1993 I suppose, but the enologists didn't specify the vintage__. I leave the text in French for convenience :

Vin Blanc D'Alsace 1472 -------- Riesling récent pour comparaison Masse volumique à 20°C : 1,0035g/cm3 --- 0,9910 Alc. par vol : 9,4% --- 12% Extrait sec densimétrique : 46,5g/l --- 22,2 g/l pH : 2,28 --- 3,1 Acidité totale(g/l acide sulfurique) : 9,0 --- 5,0 Acidité volatile (g/l acide sulfurique) : 1,12 --- 0,30 Acétaldéhide (mg/l) : 685 --- <50 Anhydride sulfureux total (mg/l) : 350 --- <210 The high figures for solids (extraits secs) and the high acidity results from the long élevage in wood, with the evaporation of both the alcohol and the water part of the wine. Walking through the cellar

Page about the History of Alsace
L'Alsace (news website) about the analysis of the 1472 white wine by enologists
Wikipedia page (in French) on the Cave des Hospices de Strasbourg
Article by WebCaviste
Story by 20dalsace.com

Goethe in Strasbourg This is on the Place de L'Université in Strasbourg, a very quiet park with the statue of Goethe, who was a student in Straßburg between april 1770 and august 1771. Goethe stands here between two muses in this work by Ernst Waegener dating from 1904 : Mélpomène on the right, muse of tragedy, and Polymnie (pictured here), muse of lyric poetry. In my student years, I used to live with my parents 200 meters away on Quai Koch along the ill river.

Cave Historique des Hospices de Strasbourg 1 Place de l'Hôpital 67000 Strasbourg phone 03 88 11 64 50 Satellite view of the building

Comments

[Gerard McHugh]

That was very very interesting! Thank you for sharing this information.