Oldest wine in the world has been discovered
(EL PAIS) – The oldest wine in the world, over 2,000 years old, has been discovered at a Roman necropolis in Carmona, a city in the southern Spanish region of Andalusia. A team from the Department of Organic Chemistry of the University of Córdoba, led by Professor José Rafael Ruiz Arrebola, in collaboration with Carmona City Council, made the discovery. The finding supersedes the Speyer wine bottle, discovered in 1867 and dated between 325 and 350 AD, which is preserved in the Historical Museum of Pfalz (Germany) and considered the world’s oldest known bottle of wine.
In a media release, the Scientific Culture and Innovation Unit, dependent on the Ministry of Science and Innovation, said that Hispana, Senicio and the other four bodies (two men and two women) discovered inside a Roman tomb in Carmona in 2019, “never imagined that what for them was just a funerary ritual would end up being relevant 2,000 years later for another reason.”
The funerary ritual, it has been discovered, immersed the skeletal remains of one of the men in a liquid inside a glass funerary urn. This liquid, which over time has acquired a reddish hue, has been preserved since the 1st century AD. “At first we were very surprised that this liquid was preserved in one of the funerary urns,” explained the municipal archaeologist of Carmona, Juan Manuel Román. However, the good conservation conditions of the tomb, which has been preserved “intact and well sealed” during all this time, “is what made it possible for the wine to maintain its natural state and to rule out other possible causes for this liquid, such as flooding or leaks inside the chamber, or condensation processes.”