“An incredible surprise.” A group of Spanish researchers has found inside a funerary urn from around 2,000 years ago, a wine still in a liquid state, the oldest in the world. The team led by José Rafael Ruiz Arrebola, an organic chemist from the University of Cordoba, found the incredible find in a Roman tomb in the Andalusian city of Carmona.
The oldest wine ever discovered
The results of the analyzes were published in the journal “Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports”: to be sure that it was really wine and not a liquid derived from spills or condensation processes, the researchers conducted a series of chemical analyzes to determine the pH, the presence of organic matter, mineral salts and substances derived from the remains of the deceased or from the glass urn itself. The tests gave confirmation: it is wine, containing seven particular polyphenols which are also present in modern wines from Andalusia.
Arrebola explained how the urn was found: “We found a submerged tomb carved into the rock, which allowed the urn to remain standing for 2,000 years. The exceptional discovery of the urn containing the cremated human remains and the liquid reddish remained intact for approximately 2,000 years was a unique opportunity to examine the chemical composition of the liquid to ascertain whether it was the oldest wine in the world.”
The analyses: it is white wine
The tomb was made up of eight burial niches, inside which various urns were kept, including the one with the liquid still well preserved. After establishing that it was wine, the researchers tried to understand whether it was red or white: “The lack of syringic acid, which forms when the main pigment in red wines decomposes, clearly indicated a white wine, as did the local Roman mosaics showing people trampling on white grapes”. The wine discovered in Spain dates back to the first century AD and is in all respects the oldest in the world. Previously the record was held by a bottle of wine discovered in 1867 in Speyer, Germany, and dating back to the fourth century AD.