The title of the oldest wine in the world goes to a 2,000-year-old white wine found in southwestern Spain

The title of oldest wine in the world belongs to a 2,000-year-old white wine found in southwestern Spain

Lars Fischer

In 2019, an excavation team made a remarkable discovery in the town of Carmona in southwestern Spain. At the bottom of a shaft found during construction work, the team discovered a sealed burial chamber from the early 1st century AD – untouched for 2,000 years.

Six of the eight wall niches in the underground vault contained urns and grave goods, including a bottle that still contained remnants of perfume. One of the niches, marked L-8 and located to the right of the entrance, surprised archaeologists. The glass urn, placed in a lead casing, was filled to the brim with a reddish liquid. According to a new study in Journal of Archaeological Science: reports, a team led by chemist José Rafael Ruiz Arrebola discovered that it was a 2,000-year-old wine, more precisely a white wine. That makes the find the oldest wine in the world still in liquid form. It is about 300 years older than the previous record holder, a Roman wine found in Speyer, Germany, in 1867.

The wine of Carmona was no longer fit for drinking and was never intended for that purpose; experts found bone remains and a gold ring at the bottom of the glass vessel. The burial chamber was the final resting place of the remains of the deceased who were cremated according to Roman custom.

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Experts concluded from the condition of the burial chamber, which also contained partially preserved textiles and dry urns, that the liquid in the L-8 was part of the original contents of the vessel, not groundwater or condensation that later seeped in. Apparently, the glass urn’s lid and the lead casing surrounding it prevented the liquid from evaporating over time.

To find out what kind of liquid accompanied the deceased over the past 2,000 years, experts turned to chemical analysis. Ruiz Arrebola’s team suspected from the beginning that it could have been wine—the drink had great spiritual significance in the ancient world and was closely linked to religious ceremonies and burials. But it was clear from the outset that after 2,000 years, the liquid would have little in common with the original wine. So the research group analyzed chemical traces—salts and trace elements in the grapes, as well as possible traces of alcohol. Finally, Ruiz Arrebola and his colleagues looked for a class of substances typical of wine: polyphenols.

The researchers found multiple types of polyphenols in the liquid. This finding, along with the cultural context of the site, makes it likely that the liquid was wine. One polyphenol the team did not find, however, was syringic acid, a breakdown product of the main pigment that gives red wines their typical color. This compound can be used to determine the color of wine from an archaeological find, even if it is a dried residue.

Ruiz Arrebola’s team therefore concluded that the liquid that had turned red over the centuries was white wine. In their paper, the researchers cite the first-century Roman author Lucius Iunius Moderatus Columella, who specifically mentioned the production of white wine in the then province of Baetica, which includes present-day Carmona. The mineral profile of the urn’s contents is also similar to modern sherry and fino wines produced in regions near the burial site.

This article was originally published in Spectrum of knowledge and has been reprinted with permission.