The construction of this giant wine cask was commissioned by Duke Heinrich Julius of Brunswick-Lüneburg (1564-1613), the Protestant bishop of Halberstadt Abbey (Saxony-Anhalt). He was a patron of the arts, had magnificent buildings erected and tried to increase the prosperity of his country by opening up new mines and draining swampland. It is said that he introduced the potato to Germany in 1597. The occasion for the construction was the lost bet of a bishop from the Rhineland. The barrel was completed by the cooper Michael Werner from Landau in 1594. He had also carpentered the first Heidelberg bar rel (where an even larger barrel stands today). Such giant wine barrels were the result of a competition that broke out in the 16th century between the Electors of the Palatinate and the Electors of Saxony for possession of the largest wine barrel and were thus purely prestige objects.
The barrel consists of 93 oak staves and has a capacity of 144,000 litres. It is 7.56 metres long on the inside and between 8.33 and 8.48 metres long on the outside. The diameter of the inner stave edges is 4.37 metres, and the weight of the empty barrel is 637 hundredweights (31,850 kg). The cost of construction, not including the wood, was 6,000 thalers. In Heinrich Julius' time it had also been filled. This required 4,500 one-third barrels (32/33 litres) filled with Rhine wine. Since 2008, it has been listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest giant wine barrel in the world. In terms of volume, it is also one of the largest wine barrels in the world. Originally, the barrel stood in the castle in Gröningen. When the dilapidated castle was demolished in the late 18th century, Baron Ernst Ludwig Christoph von Spiegel (1711-1785) had the barrel brought to Halberstadt along with some stone heraldic panels and placed in the cellar of the Spiegelsberge hunting lodge (hence the name "Halberstadt wine barrel"). See also a list of other superlatives in viticulture under records.
Source: Halberstadt
Barrel: By Ralf Staufenbiel - Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0 en, Link
Postcard: Halberstadt Museum
