The world’s oldest wine has been found – but you really don’t want to try it

Archaeologists have discovered an urn containing the world’s oldest wine, made around 2,000 years ago.

You might think that would make quite the fine vintage, but unfortunately the urn also contained something else.

The cremated remains of a man, all mixed in. Yum.

Back in 2019, a Roman tomb was discovered in Carmona, Spain, containing a range of funerary urns and the remains of a man and a woman.

Inside one of the urns was a reddish liquid, together with the cremated bone remains. 

Wine held religious significance in the ancient Roman world, so the team, led by the University of Cordoba’s Professor José Rafael Ruiz Arrebola, suspected it may once have been wine. However, typically over such a long period, the drink degrades and loses its essential characteristics to the point it is no longer considered wine.

The team analysed the liquid – not by drinking it – looking at indicators such as its acidity, the absence of organic matter, which should have disappeared over two millennia, and mineral salts.

Rather more grim tests included determining whether certain elements or chemical compounds came from the wine or the cremated remains, such as the levels of potassium.

However, key to saying definitively that the liquid was still wine hinged on the presence of polyphenols, biomarkers found in all wines.

While the team couldn’t be certain of where the wine was made, they found seven specific polyphenols that are also present in wine from the nearby Andalusian wine regions of Montilla-Moriles, Jerez and Sanlúcar.

Finally, the absence of one particular polyphenol, syringic acid, also indicated that the wine was originally a white variety, despite now having a reddish hue.

Juan Manuel Román, Carmona’s municipal archaeologist, said the team was very surprised to find liquid still preserved in one of the funerary urns, given how old they are. The fact it was still wine was an even bigger shock, but it seems the tomb’s condition – fully intact and well-sealed, having never had any leaks or been flooded – suited the beverage perfectly.

The findings, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, mean the ‘new’ wine beats the previous record holder, a bottle found in 1867 dated to the 4th Century CE.

And in one more twist to the story, a rather sexist one, it seems it was no coincidence that it was a man’s remains immersed in the wine. 

In ancient Rome women were prohibited from drinking – apparently, it was a ‘man’s drink’. Instead, the remains of the woman were buried alongside three amber jewels, a bottle of perfume with a patchouli scent, and the remains of fabrics. Initial analyses seeming to indicate that they were of silk.

Items were often buried alongside loved ones to accompany them on their voyage to the afterlife. As in many other societies, death had a special meaning in ancient Rome, and people also wanted to be remembered.

Thanks to some remarkable preservation, 2,000 years on, this particular man and woman have not been forgotten – and in fact, are making headlines.