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Read the fine print on almost any bottle of wine and you’ll see it “contains sulfites.” Scientists who recently documented a 2,000-year-old vintage found in the village of Carmona in southern Spain, may need to add a more gruesome warning: “Contains the remains of a dead Roman guy.”
To be fair, the wine was found in a tomb. And the practice of mixing wine and human remains was not uncommon in Roman times. But it’s very uncommon for grave goods from millennia ago to avoid grave robbers or simple breakage.
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“We were very surprised that liquid was preserved in one of the funerary urns,” said archaeologist Juan Manuel Román of Carmona’s Museum of the City in a press release announcing the discovery.
The chamber with its still intact urn was uncovered in 2019. But it wasn’t immediately clear if the urn contained wine or if something else had seeped in since the burial. Other urns in the chamber were dry, suggesting that it hadn’t been subject to flooding or condensation.
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Chemical analysis confirmed the finding. As reported in the Journal of Archaeological Science: “The mineral salt composition of the liquid was quite similar to fino wines currently produced in the former Baetic region.” (Fino is a dry white sherry.)
The reports adds: “Analyzing the liquid for polyphenols typically present in current wines allowed further insight into the identity of the liquid. The results confirmed with a high certainty that the liquid was wine and, more specifically, white wine, an assumption strengthened by the presence of ethanol at very low concentration. However surprising, this result is consistent with the very good preservation condition of the studied mausoleum.”
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The report suggests that cremated remains were placed in the urn, which was then “filled with wine in a sort of libation ritual in the burial ceremony or as part of the burial rite to help the deceased in their transition to a better world.”
It concludes: “The results obtained in this work strongly suggest that the reddish liquid in the ash urn was originally wine that decayed with time, and that it was about 2,000 years old, and hence the oldest wine found to date.”
The first-century find smashes the previous record for oldest wine held by the Speyer wine bottle, named after the German city near where it was found in 1867. That bottle dates from the 4th century and is only presumed to contain wine since it has never been opened. Perhaps it’s best to let it age a few more hundred years.
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