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Wine in a glass jar. Photo by Juan Manuel Roman.
A 2,000-year-old white wine of Andalusian origin is the oldest wine ever discovered.
Hispana, Cenicio and four other people (two men and two women, whose names remain unknown) who inhabited the Roman tomb discovered in Carmona in 2019 probably never imagined that what was a funerary ritual for them would become significant for an entirely different reason 2,000 years later.
As part of the ceremony, the remains of one of the men were immersed in a liquid in a glass urn. The liquid, which has turned reddish over time and has been preserved since the 1st century AD, was identified by a team led by Professor José Rafael Ruiz Arebola of the Department of Organic Chemistry at the University of Córdoba, in collaboration with the city of Carmona, as the oldest wine ever found, beating out a bottle of Speyer wine found in 1867 and dated to the 4th century AD, kept in the Pfalz Historical Museum in Germany.
“At first we were very surprised to find liquid preserved in one of the burial urns,” explains Juan Manuel Roman, an archaeologist from the city of Carmona. Even though 2,000 years had passed, the state of preservation of the tomb was extraordinary. The tomb was completely intact and had been tightly sealed since then, allowing the wine to remain in its natural state and ruling out other causes such as floods, interior leaks or condensation processes.
The challenge was to dispel the team’s doubts and confirm that the reddish liquid was indeed wine, rather than a liquid that had once been wine but had lost many of its essential characteristics. To achieve this, they carried out a series of chemical analyses at UCO’s Central Research Support Service (SCAI) and submitted the results to Journal of Archaeological Sciences: Reports.
They examined the wine’s pH value, the absence of organic matter and mineral salts, the presence of certain compounds that could be linked to the glass of the urn and the bones of the deceased, and compared it with modern wines from Montilla-Moriles, Jerez and Sanlúcar. Thanks to these, they obtained the first evidence that the liquid was in fact wine.
But the key to identifying them was polyphenols, biomarkers present in all wines. Thanks to a technique that allows them to identify minute amounts of these compounds, the team discovered seven specific polyphenols that were also present in the wines of Montilla-Moriles, Jerez and Sanlúcar.
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(a), (b) Funeral chamber. (c) Urn in niche 8. (d) Lead case containing urn. (e) Reddish liquid inside the urn. Courtesy of: Journal of Archaeological Sciences: Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2024.104636
The wine was identified as white by the absence of a specific polyphenol, syringic acid. Despite this, and the fact that this type of wine matches bibliographical, archaeological and iconographical sources, the team explains that the absence of this acid could be due to deterioration over time.
The greatest difficulty will be pinpointing the origins of the wine, as there are no contemporary samples to compare it with. Still, the mineral salts in the tomb’s liquid match those of the white wines currently produced in this area, which once belonged to the province of Betis, and in particular Montilla-Moriles wine.
For more information:
Daniel Cosano et al. “New Archaeological Findings on Roman Wine from Baetica” Journal of Archaeological Sciences: Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2024.104636
Journal Information:
Journal of Archaeological Sciences