Antiques Roadshow expert Andy McConnell thought he was drinking wine, but the reality will make you hurl
An antiques expert made a grave error after drinking from an 180-year-old bottle in front of a crowd of people.
Andy McConnell would probably do things very differently if he had a chance, I know I would have.
For most people it kind of goes without saying that you don’t drink from a bottle unless you know the contents, but it seems Andy threw this rule out the window while on an episode of BBC’s Antiques Roadshow.
As you can imagine the show looks at weird and wonderful antiques and artefacts from countless periods of history and has them evaluated.
But in back in 2016, while inspecting the 180-year-old bottle, the glass expert and historian was surprised to find that there was still some contents in the bottle.
John, who found the bottle in his house, was keen to know more about it, so brought it in to be looked at.
Andy explained that the bottle was dated to the 1800s, adding that it was super rare to find a bottle with its contents ‘still inside’.
You couldn’t pay me enough to drink from that bottle (BBC)
I bet he wishes it was empty now.
After using a syringe to extract the liquid inside the pretty much ancient bottle, he emptied the syringe into a glass.
He then dipped his finger in the liquid while the crowd gathered around laughed nervously, before guessing the drink was either port or red wine.
He would end up being terribly wrong.
“I think it’s port… port or red wine… or it’s full of rusty old nails and that’s rust,” he said.
I can’t imagine nearly 200-year-old wine would taste that nice even if it had been the contents (BBC)
It was later revealed that the substance was actually urine. What a haunting and disgusting discovery to make… still kind of funny, though.
Host Fiona Bruce brought Andy and John back together three years on from the original video where John revealed he’d discovered the bottle buried upside down in the threshold of his kitchen.
“It was too good of an opportunity to miss,” Andy declared to Fiona, who then revealed the bottle had been sent off to Loughborough University for further testing.
“Now, you thought it might have been port or wine,” Fiona began, before trailing off.
“That would’ve been nice… inside were these brass pins, all of these dating from the late 1840s, and the liquid – urine, a tiny bit of alcohol and one human hair.”
Fiona then went on to explain that it was a ‘witches bottle’ created as a talisman to protect against ‘witchcraft, against curses, against misfortune coming into the home’.
So there you go, lesson learned. Don’t go drinking nearly 200-year-old bottles hoping to find old wine.
Featured Image Credit: BBC
