The oldest wine ever found comes from Andalusia, a white wine that is more than 2,000 years old. A 2019 excavation in Carmona revealed that the oldest wine ever found had been preserved in a man’s grave for 2,000 years, shedding light on important aspects of Roman funeral rituals and gender norms.

In 2019, a Roman tomb was opened in Carmona containing the remains of six people: Hispano, Senisio, two other men, and two women whose names are unknown. Living 2,000 years ago, these inhabitants probably never imagined that burial ceremonies would take on such importance in the modern era. During one such ritual, the skeletal remains of one of the men were submerged in a liquid in a glass burial jar.

This liquid, which has acquired a reddish color over time, has been preserved since the 1st century AD and a team from the Department of Organic Chemistry of the University of Córdoba, led by Professor José Rafael Ruiz Arrebola, in collaboration with the city authorities, Carmona described it as the oldest wine ever discovered, leaving behind a bottle of Speyer wine found in 1867, dated to the fourth century AD, kept in the Historical Museum of the city of Palatinate (Germany).

“At first we were very surprised by the preservation of liquid in one of the burial vessels,” explains Juan Manuel Roman, municipal archaeologist of the city of Carmona. After all, 2,000 years had passed, but the conditions of preservation of the tomb were extraordinary; the tomb, which has been completely intact and well sealed since then, has allowed the wine to remain in its natural state, except for other causes such as flooding, leaks inside the chamber or condensation processes.

The challenge was to dispel the research team’s doubts and confirm that the reddish liquid was indeed wine, and not a liquid that had once been wine but had lost most of its essential characteristics. To do this, they carried out a series of chemical analyses at the UCO’s Central Research Support Service (SCAI), which they published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. They examined its pH, the absence of organic matter, mineral salts, the presence of certain chemical compounds that could be related to the glass of the jar or to the bones of the deceased; and compared it with modern wines from Montilla-Moriles, Jerez and Sanlúcar. This gave them the first evidence that the liquid was wine.

But the key to its identification was polyphenols, biomarkers found in all wines. Using a method that can identify these compounds in very small amounts, the team found seven specific polyphenols, which were also present in the wines of Montilla Moriles, Jerez and Sanlúcar. The absence of a specific polyphenol, syrinic acid, allowed the wine to be identified as white. Despite this, and the fact that this type of wine corresponds to bibliographic, archaeological and iconographic sources, the team explains that the absence of this acid could be due to deterioration over time.

The most difficult thing was to determine the origin of the wine, since there was no comparable sample from the same period. Nevertheless, the mineral salts found in the tomb’s liquid correspond to white wines produced in the area belonging to the former province of Betis, specifically in Montilla-Moriles.

It is no coincidence that the man’s skeletal remains were soaked in wine. In ancient Rome, women were long forbidden from drinking wine. It was a man’s drink. And the two glass vessels in Carmon’s tomb are elements that show the gender segregation in Roman society’s funeral ceremonies.

While the man’s bones were soaked in wine, along with a gold ring and other skeletal remains from the burial bed on which he had been cremated, the jar containing the woman’s remains contained not a single drop of wine, only three amber ornaments, a bottle of patchouli-scented perfume, and traces of fabric that preliminary analysis showed to be silk.

Wine, rings, perfumes and other items were part of the funerary supplies that were supposed to accompany the deceased on their journey to the afterlife. In ancient Rome, as in other societies, death had a special meaning and people wanted to be remembered in some way, in order to survive. This tomb, originally a circular mausoleum that probably housed a wealthy family, was located next to an important road connecting Carmo to Hispalis (Seville). It was previously marked by a tower but has since disappeared. Two thousand years later, after a long period of oblivion, Hispana, Senisio and four of his companions were not only remembered but also shed light on the funerary rituals of ancient Rome, allowing the liquid in the glass jar to be identified as the oldest wine in the world.