The Gigantic Wine Barrel of Heidelberg

In a cellar under the Heidelberg Castle, in the German town of Heidelberg, sits a gigantic wooden keg. It’s the world’s largest wine barrel with an astounding capacity of 219,000 liters—although back in the 18th century, when it was built, the Heidelberg Tun was slightly larger. Sitting empty all these centuries, the oak had dried and shrank reducing the barrel’s capacity by some 2,700 liters. In fact, the Heidelberg Tun has sat empty for most of its life. When Mark Twain went to visit the famous wine barrel, the Tun’s enormous size failed to excite him. He wrote about it in some disdain in his travelogue A Tramp Abroad :  Everybody has heard of the great Heidelberg Tun, and most people have seen it, no doubt. It is a wine-cask as big as a cottage, and some traditions say it holds eighteen hundred thousand bottles, and other traditions say it holds eighteen hundred million barrels. I think it likely that one of these statements is a mistake, and the other is a lie. However, the mere matter of capacity is a thing of no sort of consequence, since the cask is empty, and indeed has always been empty, history says. An empty cask the size of a cathedral could excite but little emotion in me. I do not see any wisdom in building a monster cask to hoard up emptiness in, when you can get a better quality, outside, any day, free of expense. Photo credit: Shujaa_777 / Shutterstock.com The Heidelberg Tun was built in 1751 by the Prince Elector Karl Theodor. In those days, building oversized wine barrels was the fashion and source of intense rivalry between many German towns and villages. The first big barrel at Heidelberg was built in 1591, provoking the rival, Duke Ludwig of Wurttemberg, to build an ever bigger barrel at Ludwigsburg Palace. It remained the largest barrel in the world until Karl Theodor surpassed it with Heidelberg Tun. This was Heidelberg’s fourth wine barrel.