I happened across this AFP article the other day, which describes a barrel of wine that has been aging in a cellar in France since 1472, and according to a few wine snobs who’ve been lucky enough to taste it’s still quite drinkable. But as I kept reading through the article, I noticed this quote from the cellar owner:
Now that strikes me as a wee tad bit on the shenanigans side. If they’ve been topping it off with a bottle of outside wine every few months for the past 500 years, how can it reasonably be considered to still be a 1472 vintage?
I mean, shoot. I’ve got a 20-year-old keg of Guinness that’s really excellent - I lose some to evaporation every year, but I just top it off with a few cans of Busch Light. Same difference, right?
For one thing, the barrels in question hold the equivalent of 1600 bottles of wine. Unless your keg of Guinness is located in Dublin, Ireland, I doubt it is of comparable volume. If you added about 4 tablespoons of Busch Light each year, you would be diluting your keg of Guinness by approximately the same degree. Negligible.
We need some math here. If you lose 1% of the wine per year then after one year you have 99% left and after 531 years you have .99^531 which is less than 0.5% left. To have 300 liters left you would need to have started out with more than 60,000 liters. The fact that you added makes no difference in the math.
But that is if the whole wine evaporates but they say the water and alcohol evaporate but the solid matter doesn’t. . . in which case you have whatever solid matter you started out with plus all that you have added over the years minus whatever you have removed.
If the solids do not evaporate and thet have been adding 3 l of wine per year, that makes 1600 l plus the original 300 so the concentration of solids is more than 6 times the original concentration.
Maybe I’m missing something - that wouldn’t be new - but I’m assuming that the wine barrel has remained sealed for >99% of the time the wine’s been in it. Wouldn’t that evaporation be excessive?
