531 year old French Wine

Cool story.

It's hard to believe that it looses 1% a year to evaporation.

I'd think that the 4 bottles of dry wine the pour into it each year to "top it off" would eventually dilute it to the point that all the original wine would have long been gone; but I'm not in the mood to do the math. ;)

Cheers, Will

That's not so hard to believe. The provenance is excellent, and the wine has been kept topped up quarterly. Now if that barrel had been kept topped with the original vintage, it would surely have become undrinkable hundreds of years ago. Basically, what they have is a solera style barrel with a very small percentage of extremely old wine in it.

Tom S

Although all wine improves with age, eventually it peaks and begins to deteriorate, no matter how well it is stored. Unless they have discovered and implemented the cyrogenic techniques of science fiction novels, a 531-year old bottle of wine (or whiskey) will NOT be drinkable.

Yeah, I'm with Tom on this. If they've been adding about a gal a year of wine to a 60 gal barrel for 531 years, I'm guessing that there's only a tiny, tiny, tiny amount there from that first year.

What kind of math would it take to determine. given a 60 gal barrel and the addition of 1 gal per year of new wine every year for 531 years, how much wine in the barrel is from any particular year, or each year?

Dave

**************************************************************************** Dave Breeden snipped-for-privacy@lightlink.com

Sounds to me like a problem for a statistician. I'll ask around.

Tom S

Assuming I remember my math correctly... :) And assuming EXACTLY one gallon of the 60 was added each year... I figure it to be 59/60 ^530

that is 59 of the 60 gallons is original wine the second year.--about

98.3 % pure (the first year would be ALL original) The second year would be 59/60 times 59/60 or about 96.7% pure.

therfore.. after 531 years (or 530 of adding to it, hence the ^530) My calculator comes back with:

1.33077 X 10^-4 or, 0.0133077 % original wine

anyone have a differant thought? Like I said.. I am trying to remember a few years back..... :)

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Your logic and formula are sound. But you've given us the result for (59/60)^531 not (59/60)^530, which is 1.35333 x 10^-4 or 0.013533 per cent. :)

Ok - the math does not look bad, but that only takes into account the volatile components of the wine. Many of the flavors, acids, etc. are not volatile and I suspect they have been concentrated beyond belief if new wine has been added every year.

That's what I was thinking as well... they mention something about solids:

"About one percent of the volume evaporates each year, it's the angels' share, so we add a bottle of dry white wine every three months. But in this barrel there is dry matter from at least 300 liters of 1472 wine, so it remains a 1472 vintage."

That's a good point. Another thing to consider is the _removal_ of wine from the barrel via tastings.

Tom S

Absolutely! Wouldn't you?

Tom S

I guess I started a good thread! I just knew someone here would whip out their Scientific Calculator-lol

Agreed. however, I offer this thought: If all the flavors, etc stay behind, what would be the problem with topping off with distilled (or otherwise purified) water? Why add the dry white wine??

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The amount of alcohol would steadily dwindle, as this is probably evaporating more quickly than the water content.

Ross.

-- Ross McKay, WebAware Pty Ltd "Words can only hurt if you try to read them. Don't play their game" - Zoolander

Good point. The article refers to "dry matter", solids that don't evaporate (or get consumed by angels, etc). I guess this just builds up over time, so maybe the wine is getting pretty thick by now...

And as for the barrel, if you've ever seen micrographs of a barrel with living culture (like at the Biohazard Lambic Page, below), you'd be hesitant to taste a wine that's been in the same barrel for 531 years. Or at least, I would.

You saw it? I turned left!

-- Ross McKay, WebAware Pty Ltd "Words can only hurt if you try to read them. Don't play their game" - Zoolander

Alcohol and water evaporate from the barrel (in proportion that is humidity dependent). If you were to add nothing but water, before long the alcohol would drop well below the point that you could call it "wine".

The concentration of old wine in the barrel has been exponentially decreasing all these years, but the concentration of wine _solids_ has been exponentially _increasing_. I'll bet that several (many?) times during the life of this barrel a _considerable_ amount of rather thick, syrupy wine had to be removed and replaced with a substantial quantity of whatever the current vintage was. Of course the French would never admit that... ;^)

Tom S

Sure, I would try it. I'm not a math wiz, but if you're tasting, then wouldn't that further reduce the amount of original wine?? Darlene

With all the solids collecting at the bottom the volume of water is no longer 60 gal .Just by SIMPLE math ~75% of the wine in that barrel is over 100 years old. It's a marketing gimmick.

Bob

what SIMPLE math are you refering to? how did you come to your conclusion of about 75%???

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