Archaeologists in Spain have discovered the world’s oldest known liquid wine in an unexpected place: mixed with ashes in a Roman-era burial urn, a new study finds.
The wine, which scientists described as a “reddish liquid,” was found in 2019 in a roughly 2,000-year-old grave during a housing development in Carmona, a city in Seville.
The use of wine in Roman burial rituals is well documented, but discovering such an old sample of wine in liquid form was “quite exceptional and unexpected,” the scientists wrote in their paper, published June 16 in the Journal of Archaeological Science: reports.
“It is a sunken tomb that was excavated from the rock, which is why it has been able to stand for 2,000 years,” he says. José Rafael Ruiz Arrebolasaid an organic chemist at the University of Córdoba and a senior author of the study The guard.
Wine contains several chemical compounds that reflect not only its taste and appearance, but also its origin. But after many years, these chemicals often undergo significant decay, making them difficult to characterize, the scientists wrote in the paper.
During the burial ritual, the cremated ashes mixed with the liquid, causing it to become cloudy, the scientists told The Guardian.
Using analytical techniques such as high-performance liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry, the scientists examined element by element to find components that belonged to the liquid.
Wine grapes contain several plant compounds known as polyphenols that serve as a “barcode,” marking their variety and the conditions in which they were grown and harvested. However, “few studies have been conducted on polyphenols in archaeological wine remains,” the scientists wrote in the study.
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When the scientists found polyphenols in the liquid sample, their suspicions were confirmed: the ancient liquid was indeed wine.
By looking at historical texts, they suspected that the wine would have been similar to modern fino wines, produced in regions of southern Spain. The scientists compared the polyphenol content of the ancient wine with today’s wines to determine that the wine probably came from Doña Mencía, a town in the south of Cordoba.
Although the liquid was reddish, it did not contain syringic acid, a substance produced when red wine decomposes. This confirmed that the original wine was indeed white.
Despite the fact that the old wine has largely decayed, it is not “in the least bit poisonous” according to microbiological analyses, Arrebola told The Guardian. Yet the scientists did not taste it.
Other ancient wine analyzes have focused on dried remains, such as the 8,000-year-old tartaric acid fingerprintsa blend of grapes and wine found on a clay jar in the Republic of Georgia. Because the new study analyzed liquid wine, this discovery is one of a kind.
“We were lucky enough to find it and analyze it – it’s something you only see once in a lifetime,” Arrebola said. CNN.
