From the book "Hugh Johnson's Wine History", the famous English wine connoisseur and author who was able to taste the  the penultimate bottle wrote:

"Perhaps the oldest bottle of wine ever drunk (with pleasure) - it was 421 years old - was uncorked in London in 1961. It was a Steinwein, i.e. a wine from the steep Stein site above Würzburg, the beautiful baroque city on the Main ... the 1540s Würzburger Stein was still alive. Nothing had made it clear to me until then that wine is truly a living organism, for this brown, Madeira-like liquid in front of me still held the active elements of life that it had absorbed from the sun that summer long ago. In a way that was difficult to grasp, this wine even hinted at its German origin. We were able to take about two sips of the centuries-old substance, before it died of exposure to the air, gave up its spirit..."

This wine, which dates back to the time of Shakespeare and the reformer Martin Luther, was harvested in the legendary wine year 1540. This vintage is still considered a "millennium wine" today.

The wine is - together with other historical bottles - on permanent loan from the Simon family from London.