Emily Chan
In 2019, archaeologists unearthed an ancient Roman tomb in Spain during construction work on a nearby house. When they opened the tomb, they found a funerary urn filled with strange contents. The urn held cremated bones and a reddish-brown liquid.
After performing analyses on the substances, the researchers realized that the fluid was a white wine. However, it had turned brown in the years since its creation. The tomb dates back to 2,000 years, making the wine the oldest that has ever been found.
The tomb was discovered in Carmona, a town in southwestern Spain, in the province of Seville. The Romans most likely built it during the first half of the first century C.E.
According to José Rafael Ruiz Arrebola, a co-author of the study and an organic chemist at the University of Córdoba in Spain, the Romans were immensely proud and liked to build funerary structures they could show off.
But, this particular tomb was hidden underground, which helped protect it from looters for millennia. Inside the tomb, researchers uncovered eight burial niches carved into the walls. Six of the niches contained urns that were made out of lead, glass, limestone, or sandstone.
Each of the urns held the remains of an individual person. The names of the occupants were inscribed on two of the vessels: Senicio and Hispanae. There was also a small jar that used to be filled with patchouli-scented perfume in one of the pots.
The wine was found in a glass urn. There were nearly five liters of the liquid. The cremated bones of a man and a gold ring decorated with Janus, the two-headed Roman god, sat at the bottom of the urn.
“We did not expect it to contain liquid, much less the quantity found,” Ruiz Arrebola said. “This was the first time something like this had been discovered. Until now, all the funerary urns found contained only cremated bone remains and various objects related to funerary offerings.”
Lab testing revealed that the liquid had a pH of 7.5, which is similar to water’s. The chemical composition of the fluid resembled wine. They found seven wine polyphenols and compared them to wines from the same region.
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