They discover the oldest wine in the world in a Roman tomb

A team of archaeologists has discovered the oldest wine in the world while investigating a Roman tomb found in 2019 in a house in the Sevillian town of Carmona, in the south of Spain.

According to a joint statement from the Carmona City Council and the University of Córdoba, organizations responsible for the investigation, it is a wine in which the skeletal remains of one of the men from that tomb were submerged in a glass urn. which there is evidence of four people in total.

Although initially it was a white wine, this liquid over time acquired a reddish tone, and has been preserved since the 1st century AD, as discovered by a team from the Department of Organic Chemistry of the University of Córdoba, led by Professor José Rafael. Ruiz Arrebola, and the municipal archaeologists.

They have identified it as the oldest liquid wine discovered to date, thus replacing the Speyer wine bottle, dated to the 4th century AD, discovered in 1867 and preserved in the Historical Museum of Pfalz (Germany).

Despite the 2,000 years that have passed, the conservation conditions of the tomb, which had been preserved, intact and well sealed during all that time, have allowed the wine to maintain its natural state.

The challenge was to prove that this reddish liquid was wine or, rather, that it was wine at another time because it had already lost many of its essential characteristics.

To do this, they resorted to a series of chemical analyses, which they published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

The key to its identification came from polyphenols, biomarkers present in all wines; Thanks to a technique capable of identifying these compounds in very low quantities, the team found seven specific polyphenols that were also present in wines from other places in southern Spain such as Montilla-Moriles, Jerez or Sanlúcar.

The most difficult thing to determine was the origin of the wine, since there is no sample from the same period to compare, but, even so, the mineral salts present in the liquid kept by the tomb agree with the white wines that are currently produced. in the territory that belonged to the ancient province of Bética (southern Spain).

The fact that wine covered the skeletal remains of a man is no coincidence, since women in ancient Rome were long prohibited from tasting wine.

If the bones of a man were immersed in wine together with a gold ring and other worked bone remains from the funerary bed in which he had been cremated, the urn containing the remains of a woman did not have a single drop of wine in it, but Yes, three amber jewels, a perfume bottle with a patchouli aroma and remains of fabrics whose first analyzes seem to indicate that they were silk.

The tomb, actually a circular mausoleum that probably housed a family with high purchasing power, was located next to the important road that connected the Roman city of Carmo (Carmona) with Hispalis (Seville) and marked with a tower (now missing).

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