Scientists have found the oldest wine ever discovered in liquid form inside a 2,000-year-old ancient Roman funerary urn.
Knewz.com has learned that chemical analysis has revealed that the ancient beverage is, more precisely, white wine.
The two-millennia-old urn was first discovered back in 2019 during home renovations at a property in Carmona, Spain.
A team of scientists had been analyzing the contents of the ancient Roman artifact and made the remarkable discovery only recently.
The team shared its findings in a paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science on Monday, June 17.
"Although ancient wines adsorbed on vessel walls or their remains can be identified with the help of specific biomarkers, no analysis of such wines in the liquid state appears to have been reported to date," the paper mentioned.
"Therefore, the 2019 finding in a Roman mausoleum in Carmona, southern Spain, of an ash urn roughly 2000 years old, containing a reddish liquid, was rather exceptional and unexpected."
The team of scientists from the University of Cordoba conducted an "archaeochemical study" of the liquid found in the urn using coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) and high-performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS).
The study revealed that the liquid contains polyphenols, which the National Institute of Health defines as "secondary plant metabolites synthesized during the development of the grape berry as a response to stress conditions."
Notably, polyphenols are one of the most important components present in red wines, contributing to the sensory properties and antioxidant activity of wines.
"The mineral salt profile and, especially, the detection and quantification of some typical polyphenols," along with the lack of syringic acid, which is only found in red wine, led the scientists to identify the ancient liquid as white wine, according to the paper.
José Rafael Ruiz Arrebola, a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Cordoba and the lead author of the research, said in a statement to CNN that the team found around 4.5 liters of the ancient white wine in the Roman urn.
"When the archaeologists opened the urn we almost froze... It was very surprising," he told the outlet.
What makes the discovery even more surprising is the fact that wine is chemically unstable and typically known to evaporate quickly, per Professor Arrebola.
"This means it is almost impossible to find what we have found."
The organic chemistry professor explained that the wine has been preserved for around two millennia because a hermetic, or airtight, seal had formed on the urn, although it is not clear how it was formed.
"The use of wine in Roman burial rituals is well-known and documented. Therefore, once the cremated remains were placed in it, the urn must have been 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," the research noted.
"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 2000 years old, and hence the oldest wine found to date."
Prior to the latest discovery, the title of the oldest wine in the world present in liquid state belonged to the 1,700-year-old Speyer wine bottle that was discovered in Germany, per CNN.
