2024 has been a heady year for wine and food archaeology, and the golden oldies keep on coming: Researchers in Spain have now identified the oldest-known liquid evidence of wine ever found.
In 2019, archaeologists discovered a 2,000-year-old ash urn in a Roman mausoleum in the southern Spanish town of Carmona, once part of the Roman Baetica region. The vessel contained charred human remains and a gold ring carved with the image of the Roman god Janus. It also held about 5 liters of a red-tinted liquid.
In a recently published paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, researchers Daniel Cosano, Juan Manuel Román, Dolores Esquivel, Fernando Lafont and José Rafael Ruiz Arrebola identified that liquid as wine. (This research represents the efforts of the University of Córdoba and the Municipal Archaeological Service of Carmona.)
At 2,000 years old, it knocks out the previous record holder, the approximately 1,700-year-old Speyer wine bottle found in 1867 in a Roman tomb in Germany. Granted, no one has ever chemically studied the contents of the still-sealed Speyer bottle. “Until now, no [Roman] cinerary urn containing cremated bone remains with wine has been found,” Ruiz told Wine Spectator via email, noting that this practice isn’t mentioned in ancient sources. “From the perspective of chemistry, it can assist experts in 'archaeoenology' to better understand the wines of that era.”
Per the paper, it was common for Romans to place wine, water, honey and other foods within mausoleums (though, it seems, not within urns). With this in mind, and after determining the fluid wasn’t leakage or condensation, the researchers chemically analyzed the liquid to find specific minerals and biomarkers that would prove it was, in fact, wine.
Initial results came back negative due to the wine’s deterioration, so the team moved on to newer techniques like plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) to analyze the liquid’s mineral salts and high-performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS) to ID any polyphenols. They also determined there was ethanol in the mix; however, there was no syringic acid, which would’ve indicated it was red wine.
This analysis showed the liquid was, indeed, white wine, which tracks: Local Roman mosaics indicate that white wines were made in this region. The wine may have received its ruddy color from the other contents of the urn, or perhaps from millennia of oxidation. “[These results] can further research into the composition of polyphenols to compare modern grapes with archaeological grapes and attempt to establish the differences between them, if any exist,” said Ruiz.
Based on what’s known about Roman winemaking and wine consumption in this region from ancient sources like Cádiz-born 1st-century writer Columella, the researchers believe the white bore similarities to fino Sherry, also from southern Spain. (At a pH of 7.5, this wine is more chemically basic than fino Sherry, but that’s likely due to decay.) The team put this idea to the test, comparing their polyphenol data with chemical analyses of several modern Sherries, and there was some overlap. The wine was probably local, per initial results.
“As a scientist, obtaining positive results after a long investigation is a satisfaction on both a professional and personal level,” said Ruiz. “Contributing to our knowledge, to a better understanding of how the history of [Andalusian] wine culture has developed, makes us value this work even more.”
But … can you drink it? Well, if you were brave enough, you’d probably be fine. “The liquid does not contain any toxic elements in appreciable quantities,” Ruiz noted, adding that analysis hadn’t found any harmful microorganisms either. “Tasting this wine, in principle, would pose no health risk.”
This is not the first aromatic find researchers have made in this tomb: Archaeologists at the site previously found a sealed rock crystal bottle (an unguentarium) containing solidified patchouli perfume.
What Is the Oldest Evidence of Wine?
Until this discovery, the oldest-known liquid evidence of wine was contained in the nearly 1,700-year-old glass Speyer bottle, which was found in Germany’s Rhineland-Palatinate region in the 19th century. But what other ancient evidence of wine is there? In 2023, researchers revealed the oldest-known evidence of white grapes, pips found at the Avdat archaeological site in Israel’s desert Negev region; those seeds date to 650 to 1000 AD.
Current understanding is that winemaking stretches back 8,000 years to what is now the Republic of Georgia. Before that, prehistoric winemakers may have traded their enophilic know-how across regions, according to research published by Prof. Peter Kupfer in 2020. Looking at the Western Hemisphere, a 2023 paper pointed to ceramic shards on Puerto Rico’s Isla de Mona as the oldest-known wine artifacts in the Americas.
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