Researchers said their analysis suggests an ash urn dating back roughly 2,000 years contains the ‘oldest wine conserved in a liquid state’ that has so far been found.
In 2019, archaeologists in the Spanish city of Carmona near Seville unearthed a Roman necropolis dating to the 1st century AD/CE.
The site was unusual in that it was largely intact and did not appear to have been disturbed. The archaeologists surmised that it was a family mausoleum belonging to inhabitants of what was then, Carmo – an important town in the Roman province of Hispania Baetica.
Six niches (‘loculi’) in the walls of the chamber held urns with cremation remains inside. Several of these niches held further grave goods – such as beads, amber in a flax or hemp bag, preserved perfume and a glass bowl – but the urn in ‘loculus’ 8 was different.
Inside the lead urn was a glass jar called an ‘olla ossuaria’. As well as cremated bone remains and a gold ring bearing the image of the god Janus, the jar was full to the brim with a preserved, reddish liquid – about five litres in total.
According to the report, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, the researchers quickly noted that: ‘The liquid could not have reached the inside of the urn through flooding or leakage in the burial chamber, nor through condensation, especially when the inside of the urn in the adjacent niche, L-7, was under identical environmental conditions but completely dry.’
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