177 YEARS OLD! Drinking the OLDEST WINE ever.

hi i'm constantine baum master of wine and today we're going back in history way back to a time when richard wagner was an up-and-coming musician baseball was a new transport and rubber bands were a recent invention how are we going to do that through the power of wine to be more precise with this 1845 177 year old madeira wine that has survived centuries but is not going to survive this tasting but the question remains am i going to survive it [Music] i bought this bottle a few months ago and it's special because it's going to be the oldest wine i've ever tasted i paid a thousand euros for it which is an insane amount of money for a bottle of alcoholic liquid but i doubt that i would find anything this old at a lower price this one was made a hundred years before the second world war ended in a world without cars phones and hamburgers there are many wines that can age a bit some that can age for a long time but the wines that can age for centuries can be counted on one hand madeira is one of them madeira is an island of the north african coast it belongs to portugal but it's actually closer to morocco and it is famous for fortified wines the story goes as follows madeira became a hub for sea travel and sailors filled up their ships with the local wine that was fortified in order to make it more stable after a while the sailors noticed that the wine actually became better after being exposed to the heat of the tropics and wines that returned from those sea journeys were in higher demand than the wines that never left the island today madeira is either stored in warm rooms on the island or it's heated through the stuff again process to create a similar effect the wine is made by adding 95 percent strength grape spirit to the fermenting wine in order to arrest fermentation and to produce a wine with around 20 percent of alcohol because of the high acid and sugar levels from the grape the high alcohol and the heat treatment these wines basically become indestructible madeira's ability to withstand long journey times turned it into the beverage of choice of the highest society in america congress celebrated the signing of the declaration of independence with madeira and thomas jefferson ordered an equivalent of 3500 bottles during his first three years in the white house pretty impressive however madeira struggled in the second half of the 19th century after the great blouse phylloxera arrived on the island many vineyards had to be replanted and they were replanted with not the best grape varieties but this wine was fortunately made before all that happened madero's ones are categorized by sweetness level and are named after the traditional grape varieties grown on the island in order of sweetness from dry to sweet that's sercia vedero boil and mamze or malvazia this is a bual or boil in portuguese the grape variety is grown in the warmer areas on the island and it produces quite a lot of sugar but it also retains its acidity quite well before i taste this wine though i want to taste this very recent bottling of the same grape variety from the same producer a bit as in amuse bush cossack garden core was established in 1745 and it's the oldest company in the madera wine trade in the 19th century they were one of the biggest and most reputable wine producers in maduro this is easy to open i like it so this five-year-old boy was aged in american oak vessels in cantero rooms warm rooms in order to really bring out these slightly baked flavors that you are looking for in madeira so it has this typical madeira color which is light mahogany with green reflexes so there's a little bit of green in the wine for some reason it smells also very typical of raisins dried apricots coffee a little bit of honey on the palate it's rich and concentrated there's quite a bit of sweetness there but there's also great acidity so it actually lifts off the sweetness and makes the wine feel less sweet more light and really delicate but overall i don't think this is a great madera i'll rate it 86 points it's well made but it's not amazing but now let's taste the wine that is 35 times as old as this well technically the 1845 is a solera wine the solera was started in 1845 but we don't 100 know how much of the 1845 is still in this bottle the wine is usually topped up with new wine on a regular basis this process was introduced in madera in the 19th century in order to make the best wines last for longer but it's more associated today with sherry production this solera was started in order to celebrate the 100th birthday of the company so it better be good i'm not 100 sure how to approach this because i don't really know what's under this capsule this is a mix of wax it seems and maybe there's another capsule yeah there's another capsule underneath so there's a capsule and then wax on top and the wax is coming off already so bear with me here opening these old wines is always a little bit messy i know lots of you will complain that i broke the cork off but what should i have done i mean i couldn't just pull the corkscrew through this top i had to take it off so let me just do my job okay madera can be stored standing upright sometimes it's even better because the alcohol in the wine is so high it might deteriorate the cork even faster so the wine is pretty stable it won't go off just by storing it upright and you might actually protect the cork by doing that that was easy that was faster i thought but but i got it out in one piece i asked my friend dimitry who's a real expert on fortified wines and he recommended decanting this wine three days in advance i don't have the time for that but i'll certainly taste it in three days again to see how it developed but i'm going to decant this wine now usually i don't necessarily like to decant really old wines because i find often times they fall apart as soon as they are being exposed to too much oxygen but in the case of madeira that's just a little bit different usually madera doesn't have a lot of deposit but i'm still going to light my candle here my phone to see when the little bit of deposit that is in there is coming and now i'm just going to decant it oh it's actually cloudy so what you need to do when decanting is you look through the wine in order to see when bits and pieces start floating through the neck of the bottle and then you stop decanting fascinating stuff check this out this is actually a little bit cloudy even though i kept the bottle standing up for weeks but still a little bit cloudy so now it's time for the big reveal the big tasting whatever i'm excited yes this is cloudy but i actually found a tasty note from one spectator from like 20 years ago and they were also mentioning that it is slightly cloudy so i'm guessing that's just normal but who cares about how it looks what does it taste like deep i'm actually getting goosebumps this is beautiful but so deep and dark there's flavor of coffee mocha chocolate a little bit of like syrup sugar cane syrup and there's also a little bit of banana flavor coming through super complex but really dark the alcohol is also really elevated there's quite a lot of it hitting your nose but it's not rough it kind of makes the wine feel lifted in a way but you can certainly feel it on the pad it's super rich a little bit aggressive again the alcohol is coming through there's a bit of grip and yeah just general aggressiveness towards my taste buds and there's a long long finish it tastes of dark chocolate or espresso espresso beans like really really intense and concentrated but also really really beautiful i find it really funny thinking about these people making this wine in 1845 to celebrate their 100 year anniversary and then me opening that bottle in front of a camera in order to share it with my audience on the internet so even as i sit here tasting this wine again and again it really starts to develop a lot so i think this will be even more beautiful in an hour in a day or maybe even in a week so this is now showing some minty character as much more complexity coming through as the alcohol slightly burns off so it's super complex over the next weeks i'm going to share this one with lots of wine lovers but i also want to share it with you so i'm going to pour some of it into this bottle to fill it up nicely and i'm going to ship it to one of my subscribers so if you're a subscriber then comment down below and let me know why you think you want to taste this wine you obviously have to be of legal drinking age in your home country and i will pick one maybe you guys will help me pick one and i will send you this wine in this bottle and then we share this experience together cool i'm rating this one 95 points it's absolutely beautiful outstanding wine and i think it's getting better and better the more it gets exposed to oxygen so there's more to come over the next few weeks crazy 177 years and it's still there so thank you for watching if you like this video then please like it down here subscribe to my channel if you haven't done so already leave me all of those comments below this video i'm so looking forward to picking one of you guys as the lucky winner i hope i see you guys again soon until then yes i'm staying thirsty and you stay thirsty too [Music]

Channel: Konstantin Baum - Master of Wine

Views: 468,604

Keywords: Konstantin Baum, Constantine Baum, Constantin Baum, Constantin, Konstantin Baum Master of Wine, Master of Wine, Master Sommelier, Sommelier, Tasting, Blind Tasting, Red Wine, White Wine, Bon Appetite, Andre Mack, Wineking, Expensive Wine, Cheap Wine, Tasting Wine, Blind tasting, Jay Wineking, Wine King Jay, Exotic Wines, Did you know they make wine, 1845 Wine, Madeira, Old Wine Tasting, Wine from 1800s, Cossart Gordon, Madeira Wine, Midera

Id: 0uM887ZTUFU

Length: 11min 8sec (668 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 04 2022