The world’s oldest wine has been discovered at a Roman burial site in Spain, and one thing is clear — it definitely had body.
For roughly 2,000 years, the wine has been held in a glass funeral urn along with the cremated ashes of a man and a gold ring inside an ancient mausoleum in Carmona, a small town in the southern region of Andalusia, according to new analysis.
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The research was carried out by a team led by scientists from the University of Córdoba and published this week in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.
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“At first we were very surprised that liquid was preserved in one of the funerary urns,” Juan Manuel Román, one of the report’s authors, said in a news release from the university. The tomb’s “conservation conditions were extraordinary; fully intact and well-sealed,” he said, adding that this had “allowed the wine to maintain its natural state” centuries later.
Although the liquid has a reddish hue, chemical analysis by a team established that “the wine contained in the urn was white,” the report said.
While the team was unable to pinpoint the wine’s origin, the report added that “the mineral profile of the reddish liquid is comparable to that of current sherry wines from Jerez,” a city around 75 miles south of Carmona.
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It was previously thought that the oldest wine preserved in a liquid state was in a Speyer wine bottle, which was unearthed from a Roman tomb near the town of Speyer in Germany and dated between A.D. 325 and 350, the report said. “This assumption has never been confirmed by chemical analysis,” it added.
The Spanish urn has been sealed in the tomb since around the first century.
It was recovered in 2019 after a family found a sunken tomb while having work done to their home, and it made headlines last year when the team announced that a crystal bottle found in one of the urns contained a 2,000-year-old patchouli-scented perfume.
The tomb containing the wine was “actually a circular mausoleum that probably housed a wealthy family,” the new release from the University of Córdoba said. It contained eight burial niches, six of which contained urns. Two had the names of the deceased carved into them: “Hispanae” and “Senicio.”
“Given the religious significance of wine in the ancient Roman world, where it was highly symbolic and closely related to burial rituals, it is unsurprising to find vessels that might have originally contained wines among burial furnishings,” the report said.
Along with the wine, the rings, perfume and other elements were intended to accompany the dead in their voyage in the afterlife. “In ancient Rome, as in other societies, death had a special meaning and people wanted to be remembered so as to remain alive in some way,” the university’s news release said.
“The fact that the man’s skeletal remains were immersed in the wine is no coincidence,” it added. “Women in ancient Rome were long prohibited from drinking wine. It was a man’s drink."
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