Speyer wine bottle

The Speyer wine bottle (or Römerwein) is a sealed vessel, presumed to contain liquid wine, and so named because it was unearthed from a Roman tomb found near Speyer, Germany. It contained the world's oldest known liquid wine (dated to about AD 325), until 2024, when a 1st century AD urn within a Roman tomb, found in the southern Spanish town of Carmona in 2019, was confirmed to still contain liquid wine.

The Speyer wine bottle most likely holds wine, and was originally found in 1867, in what is now the Rhineland-Palatinate region of Germany near Speyer, one of the oldest settlements in the area. The artifact was known until 2024 as "the world's oldest existing bottle of wine". The bottle has been dated between 325 and 350 AD and is the oldest known unopened bottle of wine in the world. Since its discovery, it has been exhibited at the Wine Museum section of the Historical Museum of the Palatinate in Speyer, always displayed in the same location within the museum. The Römerwein is housed in the museum's Tower Room. It is a 1.5 L (51 U.S. fl oz) glass vessel with amphora-like "shoulders," yellow-green in color, with dolphin-shaped handles.

The bottle was discovered in 1867 during an excavation of a 4th-century AD Roman nobleman's tomb. The tomb contained two sarcophagi, one holding the body of a man and one a woman. One source says the man was a Roman legionary and 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. There is a clear liquid in the bottom third, and a mixture similar to rosin above.